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“I said, get out.” She pointed at the door behind him with a shaking hand. “And don’t ever show your face here again. You are not welcome in this house anymore.”
Her magic sparked at those words, pumped into the ground with the bang of an invisible drum, and then the wards around the property lit up. Before he could take his next breath, the power of the protective spell she’d just activated pulled at him as if someone had sunk a hook into his middle and yanked hard.
Stumbling over his own feet, he reeled back, tripping and shuffling as he tried to move with the pull to avoid falling flat on his ass. The ward would likely drag him out all across the floor, uncaring if he flailed on his back.
Heart hammering in his chest, he lost sight of Hazel’s devastated face as the ward pulled him away from the kitchen and into the foyer. Rose’s confused expression as she leaned over the banister from the upstairs landing, looking down at him, was the last thing he saw before the ward made him stumble through the magically opened front door. Down the steps, the spell yanked him clean across the driveway and through the automatically opening wrought-iron gate.
A push, a shove, and then he landed on his knees on the sidewalk outside the Murray property. The gate closed behind him, the metallic clang echoing in the empty spot in his chest where his heart used to be.
He’d thought he knew what pain felt like.
Thought he’d already explored the deepest depth of loss.
He was wrong.
Hunching over with his hands on the ground, his soul on fire, he screamed his anguish into the night.
* * *
Hazel sank to her knees right there next to the kitchen island, her entire body trembling, her heart torn to pieces. Hot tears burned her eyes, her face, and she raised a shaking hand to her mouth. The room blurred in front of her.
Everything blurred.
Her reality melted in a surge of scorching hurt, tumbling thoughts slipping through her fingers.
Tallak’s roar of pain from the outside jolted her, the sound piercing her soul like a red-hot poker. Sobs broke out of her, tore from her lungs as if each one yanked out a sharp shard of her shattered heart.
Basil wouldn’t have grown up with the emotional abuse of a father who hated his guts. You could have spared yourself and him if you’d have ended it all years earlier.
Tallak’s accusation replayed in her mind, over and over, and with every iteration, the knife his words had stabbed her with twisted more, sank deeper.
It hurt this much, it gutted her so…because it was true.
He was right.
More sobs shook her body, shame and agony and unresolvable guilt clawing her bloody from the inside.
He was right.
If only she’d acted sooner, if she hadn’t been so fucking patient, so enduring, so filled with desperate hope that she could one day fix Robert, Basil would never have known what it was like to have the man who was supposed to be his father sneer at him with contempt and treat him like he wasn’t worth the dirt on his shoes.
It’s all my fault.
She was to blame, and if there was one truly deep, dark source of shame and guilt she carried, it wasn’t the fact that she’d ended Robert’s life—it was that she hadn’t stopped him years earlier. She’d failed Basil, and she’d never forgive herself for it.
But this miserable truth, it was only part of the reason she was sobbing, brokenhearted, on the floor.
What hurt impossibly more than her shameful failure to protect her son was that the male she’d fallen for despite herself was the one to have seen her weakness so clearly, and then forged it into a weapon to slice her wide open.
The first man she’d loved since Robert—and yes, she desperately loved Tallak, even if she couldn’t say it, even if she couldn’t get out of her own fucking head to accept his proposal and claim him as hers—the first one she’d opened up to on so many levels since her disastrous marriage, letting him see the messy truth of her, trusting him not to use it against her…and he’d gone ahead and stabbed her with it.
He’d seen the ugly, shameful parts of her, and he resented her for it.
Just like she resented herself.
Everything hurt. Her entire body hurt. Her skin was too tight, her blood toxic, every breath pulsed new pain through her cells. Her chest was a cratered battlefield, her stomach a nauseous brew.
At some point, she registered the blurry shape in front of her. Felt the hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. Heard the frantic questions.
