Page 125 of Gravehouse

I try to force the pieces together again. The priest’s story. That jaw. Emeric’s face has carried burns for as long as I’ve known him, surely the priest would’ve mentioned them. Anyone would. You don’t describe a man who frightens you that badly and leave out the one detail that would make him.

Le Boucher had patience. A fucking obscene amount of it.

Emeric? I had doubts. He got pissed when we took too long to finish a task, and God forbid I couldn’t recite a chapter from the Codex after reading it once.

Trust Le Boucher,Nonna had said.

Why tell me to trust the man who’d end up killing her? Nobody could fool Nonna that completely.Nobody.Emeric couldn’t have manipulated her that badly. Impossible.

The only other explanation would be that…

“What’s the matter, Venom?” Asher asks behind me, his voice brushing across my back. “Have a nightmare?”

The grass crackles beneath my feet, and I hear him stop a few yards behind me.

I turn to face him, then hesitate as the moonlight sharpens every hard edge of his face.

Thud. Thud.

My heart kicks into a gallop, each beat pounding clear to my toes.

Those eyes. Almost white in the dark. Ice stretched over a frozen ocean…

My mouth dries up. The priest’s voice loops through my head.He had eyes that would chill the Devil.I’d convinced myself he meant empty. Soulless. A man with nothing left inside capable of thawing.

The priest wasn’t talking in metaphor's. Not completely anyway. He’d been talking about the color.

I search Asher’s face as the truth gathers itself. Every question he dodged. Every hushed secret between his family. The calm he wore when anyone else would’ve panicked. His patience with me in all the years I’ve known him.

And those fucking eyes.

He stays still. Even his breathing changes, his chest holding for half a second too long before it rises again. He watches the answer take shape across my face, following each tiny betrayal my body offers him—the widening of my eyes, the twitch in my jaw, my fingers curling against my palm.

Oxygen thickens until each breath is a struggle.

He’s always known this was coming. Maybe every soft look, every smartass comment, every touch, it all had this ending buried underneath.

I wait for him to grin and call me paranoid. I wait for some filthy joke, some clever excuse that’ll let me hate myself for doubting him.

He could remind me he’d already told me everything.

He could swear he hasn’t lied to me again.

His jaw flexes once.

He says nothing.

Silence cracks around us as Nonna’s face flashes behind my eyes. Then the priest’s poster, then Emeric’s hand flat on the table as he claimed the name.

He kills leaders. Their families. Their lovers.Anyone in his path that gets in the way.

Cold spreads under my skin. All this time, I thought we were on the same side as this evil. Turns out, we’ve been hunted by it all along.

My stomach twists, turning everything in it to acid.

I suck in a deep breath. “Asher.”

He takes a single, slow step toward me.