Page 110 of Fated In Ruin
The room was a ruin of shattered wood and glass, everything splattered with blood.
I gripped the back of Malachi’s shredded shirt and yanked him off my friend. Before I could duck, the bastard spun, his knuckles crushed my nose, pain shooting up into my skull. “You fucking bastard.” Blood ran between my fingers as I tried to stem the flow.
“Me?” Malachi pointed a finger in my face. “I’m not the one who forced her to go hungry for days at a time, who locked her in her room like a prison cell, who fucking claimed to love her, then turned her into a prisoner,your majesty.”
Something in me snapped. Before I could stop myself—and fuck self-control, by the way—my fist connected with Malachi's jaw, sending him staggering back. The satisfaction was brief, he recovered quickly, launching himself at me with a snarl. His next punch caught me square in the ribs, driving the air from my lungs.
“Kick his fucking ass, Riordan.” Blake moved behind him, blood streaming from his nose, his mouth as he wrapped his arms around Malachi’s middle. “Then I’ll gut this fucker and we can dump him in the mountains to…”
He never finished his sentence. In the chaos, I wasn’t sure whose fist caught him—mine or Malachi’s—but Blake grunt of pain was followed by a foul curse, then we were all tangled on the floor, a tangle of flailing fists and elbows and splattering blood and then I was laughing, because this feltgood.
This felt freeing.
After months of keeping my rage locked down, it was a relief to let the violence out, to give this fucker a taste of the pain he’d caused us, and we rolled across the floor, pulverizing chairs and tables in our path.
I tasted blood in my mouth as Malachi landed another hit. I drove my knee into his ribs, satisfaction flaring when something cracked. The next second, he flipped me, put me in a headlock, but I threw my weight backward, sending us both crashing into a bookshelf. Leather-bound volumes rained down around us as his arms slipped off my neck.
“I would never hurt her,” Malachi snarled, his fingers clawing at my face. “I’d sooner cut my own arm off.”
“That can be fucking arranged.” Blake produced a wickedly sharp knife in his hand, gripping the hilt in his white-knuckled fist. “Hold him still, Rohr, while I decide where to start carving.”
“Neither of you deserve her,” Malachi panted. “You never did. Evangeline was meant for greater things than ruling over some backwater clan in the middle of gods-fucking-nowhere.”
“Funny how that backwater clan was where you ended up, Draven.” Blake’s eyes were edge to edge obsidian, not a flicker of mercy in them and I banded my arm tighter around Malachi’s throat.
“I’m here to fucking keep her safe, since you fuckers can’t seem to manage even that,” he choked out. “I’m here to watch over her, like Ialways fucking have.”
Somehow, I was in his face, screaming, “Liar.You’re here to take her away from us.” I drove both palms into his chest and he slammed into the wall hard enough to splinter the plaster all the way to the ceiling, debris raining down.
“Enough.”
We all froze, breathing hard, staring at each other in the sudden silence. The still-intact grandfather clock in the corner ticked loudly, marking every miserable second of our shared shame. Blood dripped onto my white, handmade shirt, spreading like a crimson bloom.
What the hell were we doing?
“We are supposed to be working together. We are supposed to be a fuckingteam.”
Evangeline's voice sliced through the frozen silence like a blade. We separated, my fingers untwisting from Malachi's shredded shirt, Blake’s split lip dripping blood on the carpet, my shoulder throbbing.
She stood in the doorway, her face white with anger. “Look at yourselves,” she muttered, her voice trembling. “Fighting like children while Ravok grows stronger by the hour. Is this what we've come to?”
Shame hit me harder than any physical blow. I was the fucking king of this clan, for fuck’s sake. I released Malachi and stepped back, straightening my bloodied, ruined jacket.
“Every minute you waste is a gift to our enemy,” she continued. “Every drop of blood you spill fighting each other is blood that should be spent defending our people. If you can't see that, then Ravok has already won.”
She gave us one last up and down look of absolute disgust, her lip curled back from her fangs.
“I’m sleeping in Angel’s room tonight, and the three of you,” Evie hissed, her face full of disappointment, “You should clean yourselves up.” She turned and walked away, leaving us in our wreckage of pride and foolishness. The silence that followed was deafening. I looked at our bruises and bloody knuckles and saw my own regret mirrored on their faces.
“She's right, of course,” Blake muttered, sheathing his knife. “What the fuck are we doing?”
Malachi wiped blood from his lip. “Ravok isn’t coming for us,” he said quietly. “He’s coming for her. If we want to keep Evangeline safe, we need to make a plan. A real one, this time.”
I nodded. “First, we have to find him. And figure out why he’s gone into hiding.”
Malachi wiped the blood from his face, something like guilt staining his expression.
“I have a theory about that, but neither of you are going to like what I have to say.”
