Chapter 343 What The Fuck Are You Doing
Gavriel’s heart was still slamming against his ribs when the answer walked through him.
River hadn’t been looking at him.
She had been looking at the doorway behind him, where Vesper now stood, and the scream that had torn from her throat was the scream of a woman mid-orgasm watching the woman who had destroyed her wedding walk into her bathing chamber on her wedding night.
Vesper passed through Gavriel’s body the way a hand passes through steam, her form displacing nothing, her presence registering as a cold pulse that walked through his back and out of his chest.
Red dress. Dark hair. The specific posture of a woman who had located the room she was looking for and intended to make it everyone’s problem.
Tristan was still inside River when his brain caught up. His body was locked in the final pulses of a climax that his nervous system refused to release, and the transition from ecstasy to fury was so violent his vision split. He pulled out of her abruptly, the motion graceless and urgent, and reached for the folded towel on the floor beside the basin.
He handed it to River without looking away from Vesper. River took it, wrapping it around herself, her hands shaking so badly the fabric nearly slipped twice before she secured it. She stood in the bath, trembling, wet, flushed, her pink eyes enormous and filling fast.
Tristan grabbed a second towel, wrapped it around his waist, transitioning from lover to executioner.
He stepped out of the bath. Water pooled on the marble beneath his feet. His green eyes were molten, carrying a heat that had nothing to do with the woman he had just been inside and everything to do with the woman standing in his doorway.
“What the fuck are you doing.”
The words came out low. Dangerous. The specific register of a man whose rage had gone past shouting and arrived at the temperature where voices drop and consequences multiply.
Vesper’s chin lifted. Her eyes moved from Tristan to River, and the assessment was thorough, clinical, carrying a tone of cruelty. As if that reaction was exactly what she wanted.
“You are desecrating our sacred bond,” she stated. Her tone was sure, and it was clear she truly believed every word she was saying. “The Gods granted you a fated mate, and you are inside another woman on the night you were supposed to be consecrating our union.”
River’s hand flew to her mouth.
The sound she made was small and broken and buried behind her fingers, and Gavriel, still standing invisible in the corner, felt the grief hit him through a channel that had no business being open. Fresh tears tracked down her face, and the sight of them on a woman who was still trembling from an orgasm she had been pulled out of was a particular kind of cruelty that made Gavriel’s fists clench at his sides.
Tristan moved between River and Vesper’s line of sight, putting his body in the gap the way a wall fills a breach.
“You are supposed to be in a cell. You have now interrupted my wedding, upset my wife, and walked into my private chambers on my wedding night uninvited.” His voice carried cold authority. He had stopped negotiating and started sentencing. “I am going to end this. Right now. Tonight.”
“Tristan, you cannot possibly—”
“I, Tristan Aelindor, reject—”
Vesper moved.
The dagger appeared from behind her back, produced from a fold in her dress or a sheath at her spine, and the blade found her own throat before the third word of his rejection finished leaving his mouth. The edge pressed into the skin beneath her jaw, dimpling it, a thin line of red already surfacing.
“If you finish that statement,” she said, her voice carrying the specific calm of a woman who had rehearsed this too, “I will open my throat in front of your wife. If I die with the fated bond intact, you die with me. That is how Fae bonds work, Tristan.”
The bathing chamber went still. The water in the basin was still settling. Steam curled between the three of them, catching the candlelight.
River made a sound behind Tristan’s back that was half gasp, half sob. Her fingers gripped the towel at her chest with white knuckles.
Tristan looked at the dagger. He looked at the blood beading beneath it. He looked at the woman holding the blade to her own neck with the steady hand of a person who was either willing to die or willing to make everyone in the room believe she was, and the distinction between those two things was irrelevant because the result was identical.
His jaw locked.
“I, Tristan Aelindor, reject the fated bond with you, Vesper Willow.”
He finished without flinching. Every word delivered with the flat, absolute finality of a man who had weighed the cost, including his own death, and had decided that the cost of keeping the bond was higher.
Vesper hadn’t moved. The dagger was still at her throat. The blood was still beading. Her hazel eyes watched Tristan convulse with an expression that cycled through shock, fury, and the dawning recognition that the man in front of her had just called her bluff and she was holding a blade she hadn’t planned on using.
“First off, that’s not how you sever a Fae bond. Second off, I do not accept your rejection.” Her voice was thinner now, the conviction fraying at the edges. “It is a gift from the Gods, Tristan. You cannot sever what was divinely granted.”
Tristan straightened. The pain was still carved into every line of his face, but his eyes were clear, and the green of them was the green of a man who had just done the hardest thing he would ever do and found himself still standing.
“Get. Out.”
Two words. Cold. Final. Carrying the temperature of a door being closed, locked, and bricked over.
“I will never be with you. You are standing in my chambers, on my wedding night, with a blade at your own throat, threatening to kill yourself in front of my wife. You are unwell, Vesper. And you are leaving.”
Vesper’s eyes welled. The tears arrived fast.
Gavriel couldn’t tell if they were genuine or a manipulation tactic. From the looks of it, neither could Tristan.
“I feel it, Tristan. You feel something deeper with me, and you know it. But you have history with her.” Her gaze moved to River who was still trembling. “You feel obligated to be with her because you raised her and you pity her. That is obligation. What we have is fate. It’s actually real.”