vows written in BLOOD

The Scream That Changed Everything

Selene's POV

He didn't let go.

That was the thing I kept hitting against, inside my own mind, even as I fought him the simple fact that no matter what I did, his grip didn't loosen. I pushed. I twisted. I dug my fingers into his wrist and pulled. I used every bit of strength I had, and it wasn't enough, and that fact alone was more terrifying than anything he said.

Because it meant I was not getting out of this on my own.

"Stop fighting," Felix said.

His voice had lost the last of its warmth. What was left was flat and certain—the voice of a man who had run the numbers and concluded they were in his favor. He said it the way you'd say it to something small and difficult. Calm. Slightly annoyed.

"I said no." My voice came out shaking, but I kept it coming. "Let go of me. Now."

"You're going to hurt yourself."

"Let go"

"Listen to me." He shifted his grip, adjusting and repositioning, and pain shot through my arm where his fingers pressed. Not deliberate. Casual. The carelessness of it worsened it. "Think for a second. Think about what tonight looks like for you. You go back in there, you go through whatever he has planned, and then that's it. That's your life. Or"

"There is no or," I said.

"Or," he continued, like I hadn't spoken, "this. Here. Now. Something you could choose, with someone who"

"I will never choose you." The words came out quiet and obvious. "Not over him. Not over anyone."

Something crossed his face.

Not hurt. Something colder than hurt.

"You don't know him," Felix said. "I do. I've watched him with women for years. What he does. What he takes." He leaned slightly closer. "I'm offering you something easier."

My stomach turned.

"I know exactly what you're offering," I said. "And I know what it costs me. And the answer is no."

"You should be grateful"

"Grateful." The word came out of me like something I'd been handed and needed to put down immediately. "You have my arm in a grip that's leaving marks, and you're telling me to be grateful."

His expression changed.

Not quickly. It moved the practiced ease sliding away, something underneath it surfacing that had been there the whole time, underneath the cigarette and the easy questions and the drink he'd offered. Something had decided before I came out to the garden how this was going to go.

"You should have stayed inside," he said.

Then he pushed me back against the tree.

The bark hit my spine hard enough to drive the air out of me, and for one disoriented second everything was just impact and the night sky through the branches above me and his hands and the smell of smoke and alcohol and garden and my own heart thundering so loud it seemed impossible no one else could hear it.

"Stop" I gasped.

"Quiet."

"*Stop"

His hand moved toward my face.

And something in me, something below thought, below decision, below anything that could be called a choice, simply refused.

I opened my mouth.

And screamed.

Not words. Not a name. Just sound everything I had, forced out at full volume, tearing out of my throat and into the garden quiet and up into the dark like a flare going off. It hurt to make. I didn't care. I screamed until my vision blurred and my ribs ached, and the night around us seemed to shift and contract.

Felix cursed, loud and vicious, and his hand came down over my mouth.

I bit it.

Not gently. Not as a warning. I bit down as hard as I could, felt the give of skin, tasted copper, heard him yell a sound of real pain, sharp and involuntary, and his grip broke.

Half a second.

That was all I got.

I turned, my feet finding the ground, my legs pushing, but they were shaking so badly the movement was wrong, and slow, and he recovered faster than I did, and his hand came back and caught my arm, and I was back against the tree before I'd gone three steps.

"You stupid girl," he hissed.

His face was close now. The careful composure entirely gone. He was breathing hard, his bitten hand held away from his body, blood on his fingers, and his eyes were different—the eyes of a man who had been embarrassed and was rearranging the situation to make it someone else's fault.

"I was being kind," he said. "You understand that? I was giving you a choice. And you"

"Let her go."

Two words.

Quiet.

Carrying across the garden the way sound carries across water—not loud, not strained, simply reaching everything it intended to reach without effort.

Felix went completely still.

I went completely still.

For one suspended second the three of us existed in a frozen arrangement Felix with his hands on me, me against the tree, and the voice behind us that had not yet become a person.

Then it did.

Tristan walked into the garden light.

He wasn't running. He hadn't been running; that wasn't what those footsteps had been. He had been moving with purpose, which is different. Faster than walking, controlled in a way that running never is. He stopped a few feet from us and stood there, and I looked at his face, and I understood immediately that I had never seen this version of him before.

In the church he had been certain.

In the corridor he had been deliberate.

In the preparation room he had been studied calm.

This was none of those things.

This was still. But still in the way that certain things are still just before they move, coiled rather than resting, contained rather than calm. His eyes were on Felix. Only on Felix. They had gone somewhere past dark, past the usual unreadable quality, to something that had no expression left in it at all.

"Tristan." Felix's voice was different. The flatness was gone. Something else is in it now, not quite fear, not yet, but its predecessor. The moment before fear arrives is when the body has already understood something the mind hasn't caught up to. "You're misunderstanding what"

Tristan moved.

Not a long movement. Just the distance between where he was standing and where Felix was standing closed in a second, and then his fist connected with Felix's face, and the sound it made went through me like a struck chord, sharp and real and nothing like the violence I'd seen in films, which always sounds wrong, always too much or too little.

This was exactly the right amount.

Felix stumbled. His grip on my arm broke. I pushed off the tree and moved sideways, away from both of them, my legs barely cooperating, and I hit the ground with my back against the tree trunk from the other direction, sitting now, not standing, my legs folded beneath me, arms wrapped around myself.

From the ground I watched.

Tristan didn't pause.

He grabbed Felix by the front of his jacket and drove him backward into the tree I had just vacated, the branches shaking above with the impact, a few leaves drifting down into the lamplight. Felix tried to push back. Tried to get his hands up between them.

Tristan hit him again.

"No one," he said, his voice exactly as quiet as before, "touches her."

Felix's legs buckled.

He didn't fall; Tristan was still holding him, which was the only thing keeping him upright. His head dropped forward, and then Tristan let go, and Felix went to his knees on the garden path with a sound that the gravel made under his weight.

Silence.

The music from inside had stopped. Or perhaps I simply couldn't hear it anymore. The garden felt sealed around us, just the three of us and the lamplight and the sound of Felix breathing hard on the ground.

Tristan looked at him.

"What were you doing?" he asked.

His voice was the same voice he always used. That was somehow the most frightening thing about it.

Felix lifted his head. There was blood on his mouth, dark against his teeth. He laughed a short, breathless sound, more reflex than actual amusement.

"Relax," he said. "I was only"

Tristan crouched.

Getting down to Felix's level, which made the distance between them smaller and the silence more complete.

"Tell me," he said, "what you were doing."

Felix looked at him for a moment.

Then: "She didn't want you. I was I thought she could use a choice."

The air changed.

I felt it from where I sat, even five feet away, a shift, like the temperature dropping a single degree. Something in Tristan's stillness became a different kind of still.

"A choice," he repeated.

"She's a person," Felix said. Some remnant of the earlier confidence returned, foolishly propped up by the belief that rank was armor. "You treat her like a"

"You forgot the rules."

Felix's jaw tightened. "I know the rules."

"Then tell me," Tristan said, "what happens to the man who touches what belongs to someone else."

A pause.

"That rule isn't" Felix started.

"Tell me."

Something in the way he said it made Felix close his mouth.

Tristan stood. I looked down at him for a moment longer, then turned, and his eyes found me.

Something shifted in his face when he looked at me. I couldn't identify it. It moved too quickly, or I was too shaken to track it properly. But it was a change in the quality of his stillness, something that arrived and was immediately controlled.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

My throat was locked. My voice had gone somewhere it wasn't available. I tried to answer, and nothing came out.

He held my gaze for another second. Checking something. Reading something in whatever he found in my face.

Then he turned back to Felix.

He reached down and picked him up by the collar with one hand, without apparent effort, Felix's feet scrambling to find the ground, and began walking. Dragging Felix toward the main lights, toward the building, toward the path where the garden opened up, and anyone who happened to be watching from the windows could see exactly what was happening.

Felix stumbled along with him, trying to keep his feet under him, trying to talk. Words came out justifications, arguments, the kind of speech that people produce when they are trying to convince power that it has made a mistake.

Tristan did not respond to any of it.

I pushed myself upright.

My legs held, barely. I followed at a distance, because what else was there? Because the garden was not safe and the building was full of people, the only anchor point in the entire night that I could orient myself around was the man walking ahead of me dragging his second-in-command across the gravel.

That was what I had come to.

That was what safety looked like here.

Tristan stopped in the light.

He released Felix, who stumbled forward and caught himself against a stone pillar. He stood there, breathing hard, blood still on his mouth, and the light showed all of it the split lip, the beginning of something darkening below his eye, and the held-away hand with my bite mark visible on the skin.

Tristan looked at him in the light.

"You broke the rule," he said simply. "You touched her. You threatened her. You did this on my property, on my wedding night, in front of my guests."

Felix straightened. Pride and fear mixing in his face in an unsteady combination.

"You won't do anything," Felix said. "I'm your second. You need me."

"I needed you to follow the rule," Tristan said. "That was all I needed."

Something in Felix's expression changed.

The pride part left.

Tristan turned his head slightly. One of his guards—I hadn't noticed him; I hadn't seen him materialize, but he was there, at the edge of the light—received something. Not a word. Just a look.

The guard moved.

Felix's eyes went wide.

I looked away.

I looked at my own hands, dirt on the palms from where I had pressed them against the garden path, a thin red mark along my forearm where Felix's grip had been. I turned my hand over. The ring caught the light.

Heavy. Cold. Still there.

I was not alone, I thought.

The thought arrived quietly, from somewhere below the fear and the shock and the adrenaline still moving through my body.

For the first time since my birthday, since the banner and Lenora's voice and the particular loneliness of understanding that the people who should have protected me had decided not to I had not been alone in a moment that required someone else.

He had come.

He had come quickly. He had come without calling for help first or taking a moment to assess or decide whether the situation warranted his involvement. He had simply come.

I didn't know what to do with that.

Because the man who had just crossed a dark garden to reach me, the man who had hit someone for touching me, who had asked in a quieter voice than anything else tonight, Are you hurt was the same man I was afraid of.

The same man whose possession I was.

The same man from whose world there was no exit.

Tristan turned back to me.

He crossed the space between us and stopped close, not as close as Felix had been, nothing like that, but close enough that I could see his face properly in the lamplight. He looked at me the way he had looked at me in the garden after the first punch, checking something. Taking inventory.

"Can you walk?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. My voice came back small but present.

He looked at me a moment longer.

Then he held out his hand.

Not demanding. Not reaching for me. Simply held it out. An offer. A question in the shape of an open palm.

I looked at it.

I thought about all the reasons not to take it.

There were many.

I took it anyway.

His hand closed around mine, warm, and steady, exactly as it had been at the altar, and he turned and led me back toward the building, away from the light and Felix and whatever was still happening behind us.

I didn't look back.

The night was not over.

I understood that now with a clarity I hadn't had two hours ago.

Whatever came next, whatever the cost of this night turned out to be, it was still coming.

But as his hand held mine through the dark, and the garden fell away behind us, I realized something that sat uncomfortably alongside everything else.

He had come.

In a world full of people who had decided I was someone else's problem, Lenora, Felix, the guests watching from safe distances,distances and Tristan had come.

Not because he loved me.

Not because he had chosen me in any way that I had chosen him.

But he had come.

And in the particular darkness of that night, that small fact was the most complicated thing I had ever had to carry.

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