A Court of Blood & Mercy || Elriel Dual POV

Chapter 16 - I Won't Survive

If the days leading up to Elain's visit to Velaris and been torturous, the days following Azriel's visit to Osenya were worse.

He had indeed been sick, all over the tops of his leather boots as he sprinted from the tent to the treeline, and then again, across the stone balcony at the foot of the Stone Tree after a frantic winnowing had left him even more nauseous, laying in a heap on the granite floor of the Moonstone Palace.

Eliezer had found him not long after, hauling Azriel's enormous frame to bed without question. He dutifully cleaned the palace floors and the Shadowsinger's leathers and vomit-soaked skin before administering a fleet of anti-nausea herbs and tinctures. After almost two decades of intermittently discovering Azriel in ugly impairment on the floor of the entry hall of the Moonstone Palace, tonight's catatonic debilitation did not seem out of the ordinary.

The faithful servant all but tucked him into bed before ducking his head in farewell, leaving Azriel alone to sleep.

And he stayed there, in bed, for a full seventy-two hours, breaking and cycling through some sort of fucking wretched fever, his gut squeezing in on itself as he tore through broken sleep and wretched nightmares.

It was as if the vicious anger that had swelled and flamed within his gut had been so violently manic and reactive that preventing its release had caused his body to simply shut down. Holding in the violence had torn through his psyche and his gut in a way he never experienced before, the unwieldy power congregating in his siphons to such a degree that he almost feared they would crack.

His shadows had taken to hissing and swirling in the corners of his room, begging and whispering to their master, asking to carry out the violence they knew was harboring just beneath his skin.

Because the sight was burned into the back of his eyelids.

Burned and branded and welded like iron, etched so strongly, he almost wondered if it had been tattooed.

Because seeing Lucien tangled with that female was somehow worse than seeing him tangled with Elain.

Way fucking worse.

Because Elain was Lucien's mate. They had a daughter. And for the past two decades, Azriel wasn't under some grand delusion that the babe was a miraculous conception. He knew— by report and by common sense that there was some sort of attraction there. The entanglement of Elain and Lucien was not only to be expected— it was natural. Hideous and frustrating and altogether life-destroying, but also natural.

Seeing her with him had crushed the idiotic foolish hopes he had been nursing during that short spy mission outside her estate, but it had not gone against everything he believed to be reality. That soul-defiling moment had happened twenty years earlier, on the day she had left Velaris.

But this?

Lucien moaning with his hands tangled in the hair of a stranger? Thrusting and claiming and fucking anyone other than his mate?

It made Azriel furious. Vicious and violent and vengeful. Like he could tear the red-haired male limb from limb in an instant.

It almost felt like his OWN mating bond had been betrayed. Which made no damn sense. Because firstly, he never supported that bond in the first place. And secondly, shouldn't he be finding a sick and secret type of pleasure at the knowledge of Lucien's apparent character flaws? Shouldn't he be gleeful at the discovery of such unfaithful meanderings? Perhaps the weakness within Elain and Lucien's mating bond could open an opportunity for his own selfish desires.

But no.

No joy and no glee filled his soul. There was no pleasure and no triumph.

Only pain.