Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)
Page 35
There was no hint of life in him. Abel would have known if there was. He would have felt it.
Seth really was dead.
“For fuck’s sake, man,” he said, hand tightening on the neck of the tequila bottle, “you weren’t supposed to die first.”
He had never planned on burying his baby brother. They were hunters, sure, and hunting was dangerous, but Abel was older. He was reckless. Seth was the baby, and this was just so fucking wrong.
Abel took another long drink, and the sting of tequila was as bad as the sting in his eyes.
He pounded his empty fist on Seth’s chest. If it had been any other stone, the blow would have been hard enough to crack it—Abel couldn’t have held back if he wanted to. But all that happened was that his wrist ached. Abel hit him again, and again, and then he smashed the empty bottle on the floor and that still wasn’t enough to bring him back.
“Fuck you, Seth,” Abel said, swinging another punch at him and missing. His vision had doubled, quadrupled. He couldn’t even hit a stationary object.
He slid to the base of the table, sitting next to Seth among the shards of glass and singed flowers.
Even when he wasn’t looking at the body anymore, that face was impossible to get out of his head. Seth’s death mask looked a lot like his face when he’d realized Rylie was leaving him for Abel. That horrible, crushed look of a man who knew his life was over.
Abel wanted to say something else to Seth. There was a lot of bullshit he should have said. Like how he was sorry for taking Rylie—but that wouldn’t have helped anyway, because Abel wasn’t really sorry; he had always needed Rylie in a way that Seth didn’t. And wasn’t that a horrible thing to think now that his brother was dead? That he was still glad that he had come out on top?
He wanted to say that Seth should have been Alpha all along, because he was the responsible one, the good guy, the man that could make the hard decisions and do it right.
Abel wanted to apologize for being a jackass.
None of it mattered. Seth was in a better place—a place where he wasn’t hurting. With, like, angels and haloes and harps and shit. There was no doubt in Abel’s mind that if human souls could end up in some lush Heaven with hot naked ladies, Seth would have been first in line to end up there.
Except that Abel knew angels. He was going to have an angel as a son-in-law—what kind of fucked up shit was that?—and there was no Heaven for human souls. It was a place where those douchebags hung out talking about how much they hated mortals. That was it.
No, there was no Heaven like that, and Seth was gone.
The door opened, and a tall figure ducked into the room. At first glance, Abel expected it to be Nash. He stood in preparation of meeting him. But then the smell reached him, and the man stepped into the candlelight, and Abel realized that it wasn’t Nash after all.
James held his empty hands in front of him. Abel had seen what the witch could do. He knew that being empty-handed didn’t mean nothing.
Abel loosed a low growl, his fingertips itching as claws emerged from the nails. He had never been able to selectively shift like Rylie had. He hadn’t thought it was possible. But seeing this man at Seth’s grave made him angry enough that the wolf wanted to leap out and rip James’s throat open.
“I’ve come to pay my respects,” James said in a careful, soothing voice. “And to apologize.”
“For what?” Abel bit out. His teeth felt loose in his mouth. Jesus, he was going to lose it. He wondered if James knew how close he was to dying.
“For my role in what happened,” the witch said. He nodded to Seth’s body.
“The fuck do you mean?”
James’s face registered mild surprise. “You don’t know?”
Abel crossed the room in two steps and seized James by the throat, sinking his claws lightly into his neck. The scent of blood flooded the air. The witch tensed, but didn’t fight back. “Did you kill my brother?” Abel asked.
James didn’t look afraid. He should have been.
Just say yes. Say yes, and I’ll fucking kill you right here. Say it.
“I didn’t kill him,” James said, “but I know how to bring him back.”
Shock swept over Abel. He dropped his hand and stepped back, heartbeat pounding in his temples.
“What?” he asked.
James straightened his shirt, dabbed his fingertips at the wounds on his neck, frowned at the sight of blood. “I understand that you’re angry, Abel, but I want nothing more than to help your family. I thought that you might like to know what you can do to make all of this heartbreak…vanish.” He swept a hand through the air, and the remaining candles flickered.
Abel’s eyes traveled over the shattered glass and up the table to his brother’s body. Was he really gone? Could he still be saved?
What did James know that Abel didn’t?
“I’m listening,” Abel said.
Dear reader,
Thanks for joining me for yet another book! I’m working hard on the next book in the series, Caged in Bone. If you’d like to know when it comes out, visit my website to sign up for my new release email alerts.
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Thanks so much for your ongoing support. Happy reading!
Sara (SM Reine)
http://authorsmreine.com/
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Table of Contents
Ruled by Steel
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Dear Reader