The Stars are Dying : (Nytefall: Book 1)
The Stars are Dying: Chapter 55

“Just so we’re clear, a dagger through my chest will kill me.”

Zathrian must have read the contemplation in my heated glare from across the table. Rose sat on his right, though her reluctance could be felt the moment I’d joined them in this great dining hall. She topped my animosity, refusing to engage with either of us. I had to wonder how she’d been coaxed into her beautiful deep pink gown to be here at all.

“You’re a deceitful bastard,” I mumbled, spearing another piece of chicken. I was so fucking hungry. The weeks of minimal food were catching up to me all at once.

I’d bathed, changed into a dark, silvery silk gown that had already been laid out, and been guided down to this dining hall unnervingly by one of the Golden Guard.

“Am I really though? I never lied to you, Stray.”

“You knew who I was—what I was—this whole damn time.”

That made Rose’s attention flick to me. She’d hardly paid attention to either of us despite my trying. I resisted the urge to cover my arms as she trailed her gaze over my silver markings as though trying to decipher a language in them.

“You never knew at all?” She finally spoke.

I shook my head. “Hektor kept me very closely guarded,” I said. Every time I thought of the past five years I wanted to rage. At myself and how his protection was so obvious now. “I should have thought something of it sooner.”

“He manipulated you,” Zath growled.

I wanted to hate him. At least for a while longer. But his tight grip of his fork along with his murderous look pinched in my chest that it had been real, his care for me.

“So did someone else. Someone it turns out we both know.” I couldn’t cool my resentment at that secret. Not yet.

Zath’s face fell. “They’re not even close to the same.”

“They both lied in the name of protecting me. Neither gave me a damn choice. Neither gave me a chance to protect myself.”

“That’s not even slightly true, and you know it.” He finally matched me, pushing back. Good. I was still so hurt and livid that I was trembling inside.

“Of course you would defend him. You’ve been his messenger dog this whole time.”

His jaw worked. “I didn’t have to do anything he asked. I did it for you, dammit.”

I continued eating, and as I shifted a look to Rose I wondered if I ever wore the same look of wariness toward them with their insufferable bickering.

The thought was stolen by a light pattering of four-legged footsteps. Shifting my gaze to the doorway, I couldn’t believe the black cat had found me here too. I was about to set down my fork when a blurred, dark motion around it grew tall, and my silverware clattered from my grip. The table shook as I jolted up—

“Please let me explain!”

Stars above. I still had to be suffering from the effects of the Starlight Matter. I blinked several times, but it settled that I’d unmistakably witnessed Davina transform from a black cat. Not just any…

“I’m going to fucking kill him,” I muttered, snapping my head to Zath. He seemed just as bewildered as Rose.

Meeting my outrage, he held up his hands. “I had no knowledge of it.”

“Neither did Nyte,” Davina said, timidly advancing as though I would transform. “I only followed you in case you needed some extra help—and you did! I brought your pills…”

I huffed as I sat back down, too dizzy to do anything else. “Is there anyone else I should be aware of?” I grumbled.

Zath shrugged. “Not that I know of,” he said, reaching for an apple. He was so at ease here, not at all like the cold soldier he had been around Hektor, and no longer stiff with caution like he was when the king was in power. He had Nyte’s protection now.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I didn’t want to distract you,” Davina said timidly.

“Just…how?”

It was impossible to be mad at someone so gentle. As Davina took up the seat next to me, her expression dropped.

“I’m fae,” she admitted. “And a shapeshifter.”

My eyes immediately targeted her rounded ears, exposed from her braided coronet. Until my face relaxed with horror and my heart withered with a memory.

“You cropped your ears,” I said vacantly, recalling the tale of Lilith’s father.

Davina poured herself some wine as if to avoid meeting anyone’s judgment. “It was necessary,” she said sadly. “To be here, even before I knew about you. Many fae have done so in an attempt to elude the king and help others to hide and escape. Nyte found me when my parents were taken two centuries ago. He helped me to remain hidden, but that wasn’t the existence I wanted. I needed to fight back in whatever way I could. I knew he was Nightsdeath, but he also helped save as many of my kind as he could. He gave us hope.”

I reached over for her hand, squeezing, and she finally met my eye. “You’re amazing,” I said. It wasn’t enough. I was in awe but aching with resentment for what she’d been through.

She smiled, accepting but not entirely believing my words. “It doesn’t end with the king being overthrown. There are still those who were rising up against him anyway, and if we fall to a vampire reign…it could be worse.”

I shivered with foreboding.

“I lost my sister and parents to a nightcrawler gang attack two years before I met you,” Zath interjected. “If we’re exchanging tragic pasts.”

Just like that, my resentment dissipated to heartbreak for him. “I didn’t know—”

“I lost my job as a trade scout. Became a drunk and barely had any care for my existence. I lived here in the Central, and one night I heard a calling. It was him. I found the same hatch you did because he led me there, and when I found him, trust I was afraid and certain I’d leave that place and never look back. But he was the first company I’d had that didn’t look to me like a sorry lost cause. He was patient and truthful of the exact reason he’d coaxed me down there. He told me about the star-maiden, what she meant to him—to the world—and all he wanted me to do was go to you. Find out exactly how you were feeling. He was limited through other minds from so far away. He told me if you were truly happy and safe then he would make sure you never accompanied Cassia. But if there was ever a moment of doubt, I was to help you escape.”

I was transfixed by his story, disbelieving of it.

“I only got through the borders to Alisus thanks to him. I joined Hektor’s group and worked my way up. As it turns out, I have a talent for picking up things I shouldn’t, and I impressed him, becoming his most favored spy. And while I despised him, I gave him my unquestionable loyalty, and that wasn’t gained without doing things I will regret for the rest of my days. But you were worth it. The moment I met you, I knew you were worth it.”

My lips pinched tightly to keep from the waves of emotion that slammed into me.

“You were so quiet, but only because everything you were was bottled up. The more you eased to me, the more I saw what Nyte had tried to explain. Your passion and spirit, even in small glimpses, because H—” Zath’s mouth tried to spill a word. He tried again, but when no sound came and confusion passed for a second…

Soon you won’t be able to speak his name because it will no longer exist to anyone.

Could Nyte really have done it?

“—that bastard hardly allowed you to express yourself,” Zath continued without it. My blood chilled. “I knew almost immediately I was going to be helping you get here, to the Central. That the only way for you to break out was to do so physically. I wasn’t thinking about the world or what you could do, only that there was this one chance to help you as a person, and I was going to do whatever it took no matter where you wanted to run off to beyond that manor.”

“Zath…” I had no words, only barrels of sentiment I didn’t expect from hearing his truth.

He only smiled, and though we had some mending to do before I could trust him again, maybe I didn’t want to resent him anymore. “He’s not a hero, Astraea. Not even close. But he has never pretended to be.”

“I can’t do this,” Rose said, standing abruptly.

Zath stood too, but before she could even get a step away a shadowy touch caressed my neck. That of a lover made of sin. The room chilled with it, and everyone’s attention landed on the doorway to replace Nyte strolling through it.

“Stay, Rosalind,” he said. A command that took minimal effort, yet it demanded submission.

Both Zath and Rose eased back down, and I followed her powerful glare toward the source of the shadow coming to life in the corners of the room. He strolled in with a confidence that was too natural to be arrogance. Even though the room was an expanse of glittering black marble floors, broken only by white pillars and shards of color from the window scenes, his presence seemed to turn down the surrounding brightness wherever he went, drawing out a soothing but deadly kind of darkness that could ignite desire as quickly as it could kill.

I continued eating, trying not to give him the satisfaction of knowing his being here did anything to me. He came around behind me, leaning in close, but I didn’t get a second to react to his bold proximity when a thump speared the table next to my plate.

“You misplaced this,” he said, his voice low and twistedly seductive. Nyte sat sideways in the seat I’d deliberately left vacant, one away from the head of the table.

“I placed it perfectly, in fact.”

Reaching for my dagger, my breath hitched when his hand curled around it first, and at the same time he reached down for the leg of my chair, turning me out effortlessly to face him.

I hoped he would turn to ash with my glare of ire.

I planted my foot on the seat between his legs, intending to push him away, but he caught my calf. With the electricity that surged through me I wanted to fight him. It raised a sadistic thrill. Because going to war with Nyte would be as exhilarating as it would devastating.

“We should go—”

“No need.” Nyte cut Zath off but didn’t break my stare.

Zath and Rose tried to occupy themselves with the food and wine.

“If you’d taken it with you after stabbing me, I would have arrived much sooner,” Nyte said. The intensity between us grew as his hand slipped over my knee, exposing my leg through the cut of my gown.

“I figured,” I said.

He gave a wicked side-smile, sliding the dagger into the empty sheath at my thigh. “If you’d aimed for the heart, I would have arrived much later.” His fingers lingered, and damn him for the reaction of heat my body craved with it.

From the clean dagger and his impeccable fresh clothing, I knew he hadn’t come straight from waking after my attack. I carried a pinch of guilt with me, but I would be damned if I let him know it.

With a deep breath he let me go, standing to right my chair before sitting beside me again. Nyte helped himself to the spread in front of us. “Dying makes me famished too,” he said casually.

I couldn’t believe his lax demeanor. I didn’t know what I expected: for him to have stormed in here with bloodied hands from killing someone else; for him to be outraged over what I’d done; or for him to have commanded the room to bow for him.

Anything but this jarring normalcy.

“Why don’t you sit at the head of the table?” I ground out.

“Until I replace it to be wide enough to fit two there, I’ll remain here.”

It took me a moment and catching Zath’s nervous look to realize what he meant.

“I will never sit by you.”

Nyte chewed his food as he turned to me, bracing a hand on the back of my chair. His eyes sparkled. “What do you call this?”

Rose said, “I’m leaving—”

“Rosalind Kalisahn.” Nyte drawled her name, and the look she flashed him while bracing her hands on the table was nothing short of deadly. “I’ll admit I didn’t expect you to make it this far, but here we are.”

Her hazel gaze flashed to me, and something equally threatening shifted in Nyte. “How can you betray her like this?”

Those words struck me, each one a new dagger knowing who she meant.

“Careful,” Nyte warned, so chilling I might have shrunk if I could have focused on anything but what Rose implied.

“I haven’t—”

“She came here to kill him.”

“And it is not too late to kill you,” Nyte said.

That made Zathrian shift in his seat.

“Stop,” I said, cutting through the growing tension.

“You want to leave,” Nyte went on. “Where will you go? Do you want to tell them, or should I?”

“I’ll kill you myself.” Rose stood, and Zathrian mirrored her.

I couldn’t decipher what the fuck was going on.

“What is he talking about?” I asked her, needing to start with that.

“You’ve already decided you’re taking his side?”

“I have no side,” I snapped, stunned by my own assertiveness, but I was done being considered a mindless pawn.

Rose yielded a fraction of her volatile anger.

“You’re not the only one who was never supposed to be in the Libertatem,” Nyte said to me, picking a grape and tossing it into his mouth as he leaned back. He said nothing more, leaving it open for Rose to elaborate, and her jaw worked, her fist shifted, and only then did I see the knife she clutched.

His words registered, and I shook my head in confusion, trying to read the answer Rose guarded.

“It seems there is no one among us without a secret to tell.” Nyte filled the weighted silence.

I looked to my other side, where Davina met me with a sheepish look. Then to Zath, who stood braced, shifting his focus between Rose and Nyte as though he would lunge between them. Then down at the devil himself, who was enjoying prodding at Rose’s anger.

“Except me,” I said. “You all have secrets and games, and I have nothing but fragments of a twisted existence.” I wanted to believe I was safe and surrounded by friends. More than that for how deeply I’d felt for each of them…before I found myself wondering if I truly knew any of them.

“We’ll talk of that situation later,” Nyte said to Rose, then he shifted his command to Zath. “Leave us.”

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Rose snapped before Zath could guide her. Her pink hair bounced as she stormed angrily from the room. Zath cast us one last look, something of a plea for mercy, before following after her.

The scraping of wood against stone made me turn to Davina. She gave a warm, encouraging smile. “You can come to me for anything,” she said quietly, flicking a gaze behind me, and I appreciated she was trying to offer the comfort of being able to speak freely with her.

It would take time for me to believe my words could be trusted with anyone. I said nothing, unable to break the hopeful brightness on her face. I simply nodded and matched her smile.

“I would say to keep giving him hell, but lord knows the bastard enjoys it.”

I didn’t expect the casual tease from Davina, nor the easy smile she cast him that was both warming and confusing to see.

Nyte only smirked at it.

It left Nyte and me in silence. I didn’t know what to do or say.

“Will you sit with me?” he asked gently. The tone was a stark contrast to the one he’d arrived here with and had used to provoke Rose. It drew my gaze down to him, and I found it was reflected in his entire demeanor. There were no guards in the room, no other eyes; it was as if the weight of the world had been lifted to reveal someone just as vulnerable as any other person.

But he wasn’t.

He was Nightsdeath.

“What do you want from me?” I asked quietly. Now I was physically well I didn’t know what would come next. I looked over my own skin, at the silver markings that hadn’t changed. Nothing felt different except for my unstable emotions, and something within me hummed like it did when I was close to the veil. “I can’t do what you think I can. I have no power even without the Starlight Matter.”

His hand grazed mine, and I watched him carefully take it. I sat down, not having anything to lose, whether he used me by force or not.

“The things I want from you are entirely selfish and nothing to do with your power,” he said. To my bewilderment, Nyte eased off his chair to kneel before me, not letting go of my hand. “Everything from now on is your choice. Your magick—I think it will take time to resurface, and careful learning so it doesn’t overwhelm you. It’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to be damn hard, but I know you have it in you to embrace it all when you’re ready.”

“Can I ask you something?”

That seemed to lift something from him. “Anything. Anytime you need me. I would stop the rage of a battlefield just to hear you.”

My brow furrowed as I watched our hands, every slight movement of our fingers shy of intertwining. “Did I know you as Rainyte?”

I wanted to take it back with the faint tightening of his hand.

“That’s the name I was born with,” he said. “But it didn’t feel right as it was my mother who named me, and she was not here. You knew of it, but it is not what you called me.”

“Did I know you as Nightsdeath?”

“Yes and no. It has always lived within me, and you have seen the worst of it before. I can use that side of me—have the strength and power and not let him win—though it takes immense focus and energy. But as for what happened in the throne room…I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I tried to fight it, but having just been freed from behind the veil and finally confronted by my father, I should have known he would replace a way. The threat he made to your life twice, it took over faster than I could grasp control.”

“I understand,” I said, and it was the truth. “In fact, I’m glad I got to see you—all of you.”

My mind and heart fought with the vulnerability that spilled across his face. He looked so much younger, softer. My heart cried for him.

He raised my hand slowly to place it on his cheek. “What do you see, Starlight?” he all but whispered. “You didn’t know who I was, what I was, yet you reached for me as much as I did for you. What do you see?”

The question pounded in my chest. I didn’t want to give him a wrong answer. Until I became so sure, so undeniably certain, it was the question that wasn’t right.

“When it was just you and me in that void, all you wanted was for the light to be gone. So did I,” I confessed. His gold irises held me with soft attention. “I might be made of light and you of dark, but I wanted to meet you there. You haven’t always been something I can see, but you’ve always been something I can feel. It’s safe and promising. Despite everything, seeing threatens the truth of that. When I couldn’t be certain Nightsdeath wouldn’t kill me, I wanted to see a monster, and only when light winked out did I feel you again.”

Nyte’s eyes closed as if freedom had become him, his head bowed, and all I wanted was to raise him from his knees and set aside everything I still had to learn about him and the role he was to live out here now.

“I would meet you in the darkness. Every time you called,” he said quietly.

“Why does that sound like you’re running away?”

“That’s not what my leaving is. We tried. I’ve spent five centuries since I was dragged here as a child trying to figure out if I could make my place here, but it will always be at the cost of something too great.” His lips brushed my knuckles. “You.”

I shook my head. Denial was all I had. This couldn’t end before it had even begun. I wanted the time to forgive him, time to understand, and time to remember.

Nyte stood, and I couldn’t stop my impulse to copy him. My heart pounded like a war drum to my mind that battled with letting him go and begging him to stay. Gravity pulled us closer until our bodies touched. My hands met his chest, and in those molten eyes it was like I could see we stood on the same battlefield.

Until we both lay down our surrender and made our stars collide.

Nyte’s mouth on mine exploded through my body. I barely heard the clash of plates and silverware as one of his arms hooked around me and the other scattered everything on the table before lifting me onto it. Everywhere he touched I came alive with a searing heat. When my leg slipped free, he found it immediately, the groan from his mouth tightening my core.

“Anyone could come,” I panted when his lips traveled along my jaw.

“I can stop.” Every cadence of those three words vibrated over me to scatter any call for decency.

In answer my hands took his face to bring his lips back to mine. His tongue swept across my lips, and I opened for him. Being claimed by Nyte was more than I could ever imagine. Every time we kissed, we touched upon something new and tangled what was already there tighter and tighter. I didn’t think I would be capable of letting him go. My selfishness didn’t care to learn the true extent of what had made him so afraid to stay.

The stars were dying, and I didn’t want to become one of them if he left.

I wanted to fight it.

Fate. Death. Time.

I kissed Nyte as if we could stand against it all. My fingers fisted into his hair, his hand squeezed my thighs as they tightened around him, and with every movement against my core I didn’t care for the wildness of where we were.

“This isn’t fair,” he groaned against my lips, but he didn’t pull away.

“For you or me?”

“Both.”

We collided again, continuing to push things to the ground with a resounding clatter, and I almost wondered if he would climb atop the table with me. My skin blazed to desire it, but stars above, I couldn’t believe my own scandalous desire in such a public place. Where anyone could trespass—could even be lingering right now. And that thought only made my lust surge so much sinfully more.

“I didn’t plan to be here when you returned,” he said, his delightfully rugged breath casting down my chest. “But, fuck, the past three centuries of misery, despite all I became and all I am to you now, I would suffer all again for this.” He fixed his attention on my neck, a new palpable fury emanating from him as he traced his fingers over my scar. “Did he do this to you?” The question was strained with wrath.

I couldn’t be certain. I tried to revisit the flash of memory that had become a hazy frustration to decipher. Sometimes I thought I remembered another body, as though I was hoping to replace some other narrative to explain Drystan’s being there.

“I don’t know.”

His teeth ground. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“Don’t do anything impulsive.”

I was becoming attuned to his looks, and this one definitely said “I think we’re past that.” Gripping the folds of his coat, I pulled his mouth back to mine. With a low growl he pressed himself into me tighter. More clattering surrounded us as he kept coaxing me back. Then he did join me, effortlessly climbing over me on the table as I lay down. It was incredible how insignificant any care for the improper became with my body’s demand for him.

“My lord.” A deep voice disrupted us.

Nyte pulled out of the kiss with a groan of annoyance while my whole body was torched by awareness as it returned to me.

“This had better be something of deadly urgency,” Nyte grumbled.

I pushed myself up with him. Nyte’s arm around me lifted me off the table effortlessly, and I was glad for his tall, broad form that shielded me while I righted my gown and combed my fingers through my hair. Though nothing could erase the lingering sensation his hands had branded all over me.

“A letter for you,” the guard said eloquently.

Not just anyone.

I didn’t know how Nyte sensed I was comfortably presentable again when he stepped to the side to reveal the Golden Guard. His features were cut so sharp and beautifully with his dark skin and formally short hair. He was the one who had been assigned to Rose. I didn’t expect the small smile he offered to me—the first hint of emotion I’d seen from him to erase my fear.

“This is Elliot,” Nyte introduced.

“It’s a pleasure to finally get a chance to meet you properly, Astraea.” Elliot’s voice was so melodic it was easy to forget what he was.

“You knew me the whole time?” I asked. My gazed shifted to Nyte, but he tried to disguise his guilt by preoccupying himself with unfolding the letter.

Elliot nodded. “Our loyalty to Nyte has never changed.”

Nyte paced away as he read, seeming to disconnect from the room with it.

“Not the king?”

“I was the first to ever win the Libertatem from Pyxtia—an excellent set of trials, by the way. I only recently found out their true origin, and I’m impressed.” He paused to ease a teasing smirk. It was so normal I was beginning to harbor guilt for believing everything I’d heard and assuming the worst of him. “If we won, we were promised immortality. As you can see, it was given, but as soon as I knew how, I didn’t want it. By then it wasn’t a choice, and we were no more than his experiment to create a new vampire—one by transition, not birth.”

“There are only four of you,” I said. I wondered about the consequences of the change he’d gone through.

“There are more.”

That inspired something dark and sinister, and I became afraid to discover what other nefarious plans the king had been working toward. I was about to ask when a tug within me turned my attention to Nyte. His face was firm and scarily calculating as he paced back over to us. He crumpled the paper tightly in his fist before I watched with awe as it turned to black smoke that leaked through his fingers.

“I won’t waste my time penning a response to that,” he rumbled low. With a breath he straightened, slipping back into calm authority. “I want you to go personally. Take Zeik with you, or Kerah. Tell that bastard Auster if he wants to talk, he can very well come out of his cowardly hiding place since he’s content to send his dogs this side of the veil.”

Elliot gave a faint smile of satisfaction. “It’s been some time since we got any order of decent action,” he said.

Nyte huffed, and the exchange between them shouldn’t have been so surprising, but I warmed with the ease of what I could only discern as friendship from the clear respect they shared.

“It’s good to have you back,” Elliot said.

Nyte gave a tight nod, and Elliot cast me a warm smile with the dip of his head, which I returned before he left.

My mind backtracked to the name he spoke—one I had heard once before. “Who is Auster?”

Nyte’s jaw locked with my question, his shoulders squared. “I promised you no more secrets, but will you trust me when I say that isn’t an explanation you’ll want right now?”

My heart skipped a beat as I concluded, “I knew him?”

He nodded, but it wasn’t pleasant. “He’s a celestial—the High Celestial of the House of Nova.”

“What did he say?” I stored the mention of the celestial house to discover more about it later.

Nyte’s fingers tipped my chin. “I have something he wants.”

It only took a second for my pulse to still. “Me?”

His firming lips were my answer, and I stepped away, suddenly aware I could be used as a bargaining chip for whatever the celestial wanted. Just like Hektor had tried to sell me.

“You have nothing binding you anymore, Astraea. You are safe and free. You can walk out of this room right now and I will not stop you. Walk out of the kingdom and I may follow, but every path we take is yours to pave.”

The first part wasn’t true. He wouldn’t know it, but I was beginning to learn how to form a mental barrier against my surface thoughts so that he wouldn’t hear…

It had started off small, a thin string that had wound from him to me the moment he stopped my dance. With time it had been winding tighter, with every touch it had been forming thicker, and if I didn’t break it now…

I feared I could become forever bound to him.