Heir of Ruin: A Hades and Persephone Paranormal Fae Fantasy Romance (Fae of The Saintlands Book 1)

by Leigh Kelsey

  Azrail’s stare narrowed back at her, confused, not realising what she’d spotted. “What?”

  “Hello, Knight,” she purred, victory and adrenaline crashing in her blood. She’d found him. After all these years searching for him, she’d found him by chance. Had literally run into him.

  He scoffed, shoving wind-blown black hair out of his eyes. “I’m flattered, Maia, but—”

  “Don’t bother lying,” she replied, giving him a sweet smile. “Your scar’s showing.”

  He wrenched the leather band back into place, hiding that damning scar. “You don’t know what you saw. You’re confused.”

  Maia snorted, leaning cockily against the bridge. A euphoric feeling of victory raced through her as the wind tangled her hair. “And you’re delusional, pretty boy.”

  Even though she knew his identity, even though she was a clear threat to his anonymity, Azrail couldn’t seem to resist the cocky smile that leapt to his face. “That’s handsome man, to you. I can assure you, I’m no boy. Or do I need to kiss you again to prove it?”

  Maia flattened her lips into a line, staring at him, this myth made flesh. Damn, he was a good kisser. She’d kissed the Sapphire fucking Knight. Naemi would never believe it.

  “Why do you do it?” she asked, the question she’d been desperate to know for so long. “Why?”

  Azrail’s amused eyes hardened to pure, wrathful blue. “Because no one else will, and someone has to.”

  Maia scoffed, if only to cover up her indecision. Hand him in, or let him go? If all he’d done was free beastkind forced into indentures … she might have pretended she hadn’t seen the scar. But he’d killed people; his hands dripped blood, whether she could see it or not. “The Old Year’s Night bombing. Why?” She snarled these words, Prince Kheir’s accusation swirling around her head, as sharply barbed as his magic had been when those cunning claws held her captive.

  Azrail’s eyes filled with as much rage as hers. More. He took a step towards her, and another, and Maia backed up, her heart slamming against her ribs even as she recalled everything she could do to take him down so she might run. But her back hit the columned statue of the Iron Dove—the saint of all living things—and Maia was foolishly trapped between the column and Azrail’s unforgiving body.

  “That had nothing to do with me. Nothing! The council and crown spread that horseshit to discredit me. To turn Vassalaer against me.” He smiled, all bitterness and hate, and Maia stared, wondering what had happened to him during his life, for his charm and smirks to hide such a seething core. Wondered if she might look like that too, if she ever stripped away the years of pretense. “People supported me back then, agreed with my cause and my actions, and that was a very dangerous thing for both council and crown.”

  Maia’s stomach twisted, again a nest of vipers. She knew her aunt wasn’t above lying, or manipulating. It was … possible. Possible that she’d blame the destruction on the Sapphire Knight to stop a rebellion rising against the crown. But she couldn't accept that Ismene would set those bombs, that she’d hand down those orders, accidentally killing her own daughter in the process. Maia couldn’t accept that.

  “I don’t believe you,” she replied, her breathing fast, hands shaking even as she lifted them and shoved against his shoulders. Unmoving—a statue himself. Azrail didn’t budge an inch, pressing her up against the column holding up the Iron Dove. Would the saint of life and souls take mercy on Maia—was she looking down now and watching this happen? What did the saint think of all the lives this man had taken? Then again, she was mated to the Wolven Lord who ruled the dead, so maybe she didn’t care.

  “Liar,” Azrail replied, his lips quirking up and the hatred in his eyes shifting, now a mix of wrath and heat.

  “You’re the liar,” she hissed back at him, shoving against him again.

  “Promise to never tell anyone my secret, and I’ll let you out,” he said, the words deadly serious. A vow—that was what he wanted. Dangerous, binding words for any fae.

  She could give it, could swear to be silent. But what if he bombed another city square? What if he hurt more people? She needed to tell her aunt and the palace guard. “No,” she replied, her voice unwavering, unlike her conviction.

  “No?” he repeated, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “Do you realise how dangerous it is for you to know my secret?”

  Maia scoffed. “I don’t give a shit how much danger you’re in—”

  “No,” he replied, close enough that his breath fanned over her forehead, his scent of leather and tea leaves curling around her tongue. Any passersby would see a couple embracing, not a hostile negotiation. “It’s dangerous for you to know my secret. Do you know how many people want to know my name? Hundreds. Thousands. The most harmless of those would try to bribe you into handing over my identity, but the worst … I’m sure your imagination can conjure up something suitably bloody and pain-filled.”

  Cold dripped down Maia’s spine. Little did Azrail know, she was very well acquainted with the sort of agony he spoke of. She had become intimate with it in the blackest depths of a dungeon, had looked it in the eye and snarled in its ugly face. And survived. But what would her aunt do if she found out Maia knew who the Sapphire Knight was? She’d been terrified enough of what Ismene would do—if she’d summon him—just for failing to snare Kheir. This … worse. So much worse. “All the more reason to tell them,” she breathed, shoving against him again, hating the fear that crept in, as cold and numbing as any winter fog.

  Azrail sighed, and backed off a step, reading something in her eyes. He still had her trapped against the column, but now she had a few inches of breathing room. Not that she could get a breath in her lungs now Maia was thinking about him, the queen’s favourite hunter.

  Azrail watched her, dark blue eyes churning in a storm of emotions that proved impossible to read. “Telling people won’t make you safe, Maia.”

  She ground her teeth, wanting to go home and deadbolt her bedroom door. “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone—for now.”

  “Swear it.” He exhaled hard, all the anger leaving his expression and his posture changing, threatening to exhausted. “For my peace of mind, would you swear it? Consider it payment for all those times I’ve given you eye candy,” he added with a crooked grin.

  “Ugh,” Maia muttered, shoving him another step away. “You’re insufferable.”

  “And you’re still beautiful,” he replied. “Just beautiful and deadly now. Will you sentence me to death, beautiful Maia?”

  She groaned. “Stop it. Bastard.” She cursed, her decision already made. She couldn’t knowingly kill someone, and that was what reporting him to Ismene or the palace guard would mean: his execution. Because of her. Not a ripple effect she had a minor hand in, or an accident. A choice. She hadn’t been able to kill Kheir earlier, and she couldn’t kill Azrail now either. “Fine. I won’t tell; I vow it. Satisfied?”

  “Well, not yet, but if you’d like to come back to my house…” The grin he flashed her this time was heated and full of suggestion.

  “Don’t make me punch you in the dick,” Maia warned him, crossing her arms over her chest again. Heat flashed inappropriately through certain areas, her pussy not caring that he was a vigilante and a murderer.

  He seemed to consider it, and then shrugged his bare, glistening, muscular shoulders. Saints damn it, her eyes were glazing over again. “To get your hands on my cock, I’d allow it.”

  Maia made a sound in her throat, dragging her eyes away from him, and instead looking over the straight line of the Luvasa, the strings of lights crisscrossing the river streets like a drunk glow worm. “You could be lying about not setting those bombs.”

  “I could be,” he agreed quietly, “but I’m not.”

  She didn’t want to believe him. She selfishly wanted him to be lying, because if this was true … her aunt had tried to assassinate Maia’s parents. She might have moved to Vassalaer too young to remember her mother and father beyond a
faint memory of leather, silk, and sandalwood perfume, but that didn’t change the fact that she was their daughter, and they were her parents.

  “We can talk more about it tomorrow, if you come back to this bridge at the same time.”

  “We’ll see,” Maia replied, the adrenaline and confrontation wearing off to reveal something brittle underneath.

  “Why were you so distracted?” he asked, his sapphire eyes seeing too much. “When you ran into me, you looked a million towns away.”

  “That’s none of your business,” Maia replied, equal parts tired and cutting. She turned away, but spun back to face him after one step. “If you harm a single person, Knight, I won’t hesitate to sell you out to anyone who comes asking, whether that’s a baker, a librarian, or a queen. Vow or no vow, I’ll find a way.”

  Azrail’s expression darkened, his tan face pinched with reproach, but he nodded. “I don’t hurt anyone if I can help it. Unless they attack me first,” he added, “and you can hardly hold an act of self defense against me.”

  Maia gave him a tight smile, and knew her anger was less at him than at her own messed up self. Too many lies and truth—her aunt’s, Prince Kheir’s, and now Azrail’s, the Sapphire Knight’s. “You’ll find that I can, in fact, hold that against you.”

  “It’s not just me you consign to death,” Azrail said suddenly, holding her gaze. Unforgiving—dangerous. “You asked if I have a family. I don’t have children, but I have people who rely on me, who I care for. If you give anyone my name along with the Sapphire Knight’s, you’re taking them to the executioner’s block, too.”

  “And what about the victims of your next attack?” Maia asked softly, her words almost carried off on the wind over the Luvasa. “What about them? Shouldn’t I consider the lives I could spare by throwing you into Lady Justice’s arms?”

  Azrail just shook his dark head, either in anger or exasperation. “Believe what you want, Maia, but look into my eyes when I say this, and tell me you still think I’m lying. I have spent years freeing those wrongfully sentenced to death, getting beastkind out of their indentured bonds, and relocating people who’d be put to labour work or sent to the Wolven Lord’s black chasm. But I have not, nor will I ever, set a bomb in a square full of people, just to prove a point, or out of spite, or whatever other reason people say I did it for.”

  Maia swallowed. Let her shoulders drop, a sigh leaving her. “Go,” she said, waving a tired hand. “Go, Azrail, before I change my mind and shout for guards here and now.”

  He gave her a long, measuring look, shaking his head in judgement, and took a backwards step. “Is it stubbornness or fear?”

  “Excuse me?” she snapped.

  “That keeps you lying to yourself. I’m curious.” He watched her in a way that told her he saw everything. But not everything—he didn’t know she was a princess, or a tool of the queen, didn’t know anything about the things she did, was made to do.

  “Don’t think you know a damn thing about me, Knight,” she hissed, and turned her back on him. She halted after a few steps, and slid into the shadow of the Salt King’s statue, the saint of the sea keeping her hidden as she watched Azrail cross the bridge at a fast, annoyed clip. She leant around the column to see him take the steep steps down to the riverside, and followed him with her eyes to a cobalt blue door five houses down. She only left the shadows when he’d vanished inside.

  She had everything she needed to hand him in: his name, his description, and his address.

  But did she want to hand him in? Or did she want to interrogate him for the answers to every question she’d built up over the years?

  She didn’t know. Even trudging back across the bridge and through the arts quarter to the library, scaling the floors to her attic room where she stared at that wall of questions and answers … she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

  Chapter Ten

  The entire next day was hell. Every voice on the riverside path outside the house made Azrail tense, every rattle of a cart on the bridge at the end of the street was a score of Foxes coming to arrest him, every shout from the barges on the water weren’t innocent calls, but a capture in the beginning stages, a net ready to close around him. He should have run, should have put some distance between him and his home so Ev, Siofra, Zamanya, and Jaromir might go uncaptured—but he couldn’t leave them. Wouldn’t leave Evrille when he knew losing him, her last tie to their blood family, was one of her biggest fears. She’d had nightmares about it as a child, losing him like she’d lost their parents when she was too young to remember it. He refused to bring those nightmares back to her.

  Plus, he had Maia’s vow; there was a chance she wouldn’t break it to turn him in. She’d started to doubt the version of truth she’d been told—he’d seen it in her golden eyes, the colour of burnished sunlight. Part of her knew Azrail hadn’t set those bombs on Old Year’s Night; part of her believed him. And he prayed that part of her held her silent as he forced himself through his day, making a huge vat of fragrant vegetable stew just for something—anything—to occupy himself with. Evrille knew something was wrong, and even Siofra was watching him funny, like she could tell he was stressed, but he just assured them both that everything was okay, that as long as Sio didn’t use her magic, they were hidden.

  He was itchy and jumpy by the time it reached five in the evening, the sun just starting to dip as he changed into his running clothes, making Siofra promise not to get on Ev’s nerves too much. She only agreed when he let her run a bath, sinking neck-deep into the steaming water with a grin.

  Now, with the wind biting at his arms, Az kept an eye on the bridge as he jogged up and down the tree-lined path beside the Luvasa, the exertion loosening his tense muscles. He dragged lungfuls of sharp, musky air into his lungs as his feet pounded the paving stones, trying to steady his mind, to prepare for the battle of wills that was sure to come when Maia arrived.

  But she never did. Azrail watched Sorvauw Bridge for an hour, the air getting colder, the sky darker, but Maia never turned up.

  Neither did the Foxes—or worse, the palace guard—so he told himself it was a good thing that she’d stayed away, that it meant her conviction that he was a villain was wearing thin.

  But it would have been nice to be able to plead his case to her, to try and set his mind at ease that Foxes weren’t actually going to turn up in the middle of the night. He was terrified they would haul his family out into the street and hew their heads off there and then, while neighbours twitched their lace curtains to watch.

  Azrail’s mood only got worse with every dark thought that ran through his head, but he ran until his legs threatened to drop him on his ass. He was forced to lean against the rough stone of the river wall, letting his strength rebuild as he idly watched a library barge sail upriver, it’s engine thrumming deeply.

  He refused to carry any of this fear and restlessness into the meeting tonight. He owed his people better than that. So he waited for his legs to stop feeling like jelly and ran until he could barely stand, stumbling back to the house and sinking onto their settee with a groan, his mind clear.

  The jasmine and sage scent of home was a comfort, as was the velvety texture of the cushions beneath him and the noise of Ev clattering in the kitchen, but his best friend’s all-seeing gaze was not.

  “What’s going on?” Jaromir asked, gracefully sitting in the threadbare armchair, in front of the window Az periodically glanced through, checking the street. The setting sun made Jaro’s red-purple hair even deeper, outlining the slim shoulders of his fine black jacket in vivid orange.

  Azrail shook his head in reply, resisting the urge to drag his hand down his face. “It’s nothing.”

  The chair creaked as Jaro leant forward, his arms braced on his knees and long hair falling into his porcelain face. “Liar.”

  Az huffed, wishing Jaro didn’t know him so well. He pressed his lips into a thin line, listening to the loud cheers of a pleasure boat sailing by outside, determined not
to answer. But the truth had a mind of its own and he blurted, “You’ve been with me at the library when that woman’s there, right? The one with long silver hair and freckles?”

  Jaro nodded, thoughts spinning behind his jade eyes as he watched Azrail. “This is about a girl?”

  “Woman,” Az countered, remembering the feel of her curves aligned perfectly with his body, the need to have her as blinding as the sun. “And no, not the way you think. She knows who I am, Jaro. My bands slipped down, and she saw my scar.” He ran a finger over the thick leather, the only thing that hid that damning mark. “I don’t know if she’s going to tell anyone—she threatened to, but I’m not sure she meant it. I got her to vow to keep it secret, but…”

  Jaromir swore softly, his tall body as straight as an arrow in his chair and his face draining of colour. “We need to leave. Now.”

  “She’s had a whole day to report me,” Az admitted, bracing for his friend’s reaction.

  Jaro blinked, and blinked again. His jade green eyes narrowed with almost concealed anger. “All day—you’ve had all day to warn us?”

  Az blew out a hard breath, dragging a hand through his thick hair and tugging on the ends. “I know I’m a bastard, you don’t have to tell me,” he said miserably.

  “Why?” Jaro asked, softer now as he read Azrail’s expression, his elfin face still tight with worry. Az’s fault—that worry was his doing. If he hadn’t flirted with Maia, they’d be safe. But staying away from her was like fighting the sweep of the tide—impossible. “Why keep this from us, Az? You know Zamanya could come up with an evacuation plan in two seconds flat.”

  “I know,” Az murmured, shoving out of his seat and going to the liquor cabinet in the corner. The rattle of glasses sawed his nerves to ribbons as he poured himself a large drink. “If I knew for sure that Maia was going to turn me in, I wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  “Maia,” Jaro repeated, picking at the crimson embroidery on his sleeve. “that’s the name of this woman who’s got us by the balls?”