Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
“I didn’t mean to…” The wind rips the words away before they’re fully formed, scattering them into the howl.
It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.
The storm is a beast, stitched from fire and sand and every scream I ever tried to bury. Its body writhes across the horizon, a twisting wall of flame-veined dust, alive and ravenous.
I run to catch it. To throw myself between its teeth before it rips through the heart of the kingdom.
My chest heaves, each sand-laced breath scrapes the back of my throat as heat lashes my bare arms and legs.
The ground bucks beneath me, dunes slithering like snakes, a tide of sand writhing forward, dragging everything toward the kingdom.
I run harder, faster, legs pumping, muscles burning.
I’ve almost caught up with the storm when the first curling lash of fiery sand slams into the outer tents.
Silk rips like paper. Wooden poles snap like kindling, cartwheeling end over end before vanishing into the maelstrom.
Torches tear free, each wink extinguished as the wind devours them.
Figures stumble and scatter, silhouettes blinking in and out of view as the storm whirls them into its throat.
I throw myself into it, and the world convulses.
Sound goes wrong first. The roar stretches, pulled thin and taut as wire until it sings, sharp and brittle.
Even the slap of my footsteps sounds distant, as if someone else is running.
Behind me the corridor seals, a wall of heat and dust closing tight, hemming me into the path I’ve carved. Shapes waver inside the haze, outlines that don’t quite belong to the storm.
An ex, one in a long line of relationships doomed from the start, steps forward from the grit, grinning, lips smeared with the wrong shade of lipstick, the stain bright across his teeth.
His form swirls and twists, collapsing in on itself before another takes its place.
My mother. Just her back, always her back, moving through a doorway away from me. The door closes behind her. The lock catches. She kept herself hidden from me, and I grew up learning love as a hallway of closed doors.
The storm is splicing betrayals into a mural. Every ounce of pain I’ve ever tucked away flares back to life in unbearable detail, the storm pressing the memories close.
Friends blur into view at the edge of the corridor, then begin to fade.
The ache of being left alone spreads like a bruise under my skin.
It’s always been this way. People orbit close for a season, then slip out of reach.
Making friends has never been easy. With the exception of Gemma, keeping them has felt impossible.
Tears carve tracks down my cheeks, and I force myself to look away, to keep moving.
If I stare too long, the wounds gape wider.
If I linger, I’ll drown in them. But I can’t shut them out.
The storm knows me—it is me—and it’s offering me back to myself in jagged pieces.
It wants me to bleed with every wound I’ve ever carried.
I almost do. The taste of iron fills my mouth, my ribs ache with the pressure, and I want to let the storm swallow me whole. But I don’t. I take the pain and use it. Every memory it throws at me fuels another step. I refuse to stop long enough to let the storm, let myself, tear me apart.
The camp bleeds into view through curtains of sand and fire. I stumble forward, breaking through the last wall of the storm into what’s left of the kingdom. The wind drops, sudden and brutal in its silence, and the only sound is the ragged chorus of moans and crying that leaks through the smoke.
Shredded tents flap like torn flesh. Pieces of wood lay broken, snapped, scattered. Small fires lick at tattered fabrics and light up the eye of the storm in a tangerine glow. Ash drifts like snow, brushing my arms and sticking in my lashes.
Guards and other members of the kingdom haul people clear of the rubble.
Solara stands on the lip of the dais, jaw slack.
Her arms are wrapped around her sister as they survey the wreckage.
Zephara presses a hand to her mouth to cover her sobs.
The court clusters in tight knots, twittering like frightened birds, eyes darting between the queens and the debris.
From the stage, the Player hurls herself forward, red paint smeared across her cheek, her shirt ripped.
She limps toward the shocked queens, flailing her arms, saying something I don’t catch because my attention is focused back on the stage.
Tarek and Dav lift planks of wood from the collapsed pyre off a body. When the last beam comes free, Declan’s shape comes into view. His chest lifts in shallow, fragile hitches.
“No. No, no, no.” I don’t feel the splinters of wood that bite into my bare feet as I scramble forward. Smoke claws at my throat, and ash streaks my skin as I climb onto the stage, clambering over the wreckage like none of it matters.
Because it doesn’t. Only he does. Only Declan.
I drop to my knees beside him. Blood seeps through his shirt in a dark stain that spreads like ink across the fabric. His face is pale beneath streaks of sweat and dirt. His hair is plastered to his forehead, his lip split, his mouth trembling around the edges of another breath.
Tarek and Dav keep pulling wood off him, fingers gray with ash, palms scraped and bloody. Declan blinks at me, the corners of his mouth trying for a crooked smile. “Thought Dav would be happy finding me like this,” he says, voice paper thin.
Dav grunts as he and Tarek lift another piece of wood and throw it off the stage. “I do not delight in bloodletting if it’s not by my own hand.” His mouth is tight as he bends down and squeezes Declan’s shoulder.
Hot blood slicks my palms as I press against the wound. “Tarek, Dav, please. You have to help him. We have to—”
They share a look that wrenches the air from my lungs.
Dav’s jaw sets. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”
“Perhaps the healer…” Tarek’s words fade as he looks down at Declan then back up to Dav.
“We can try.” Dav gives Declan’s shoulder another squeeze before the two men jump off the stage and rush into the mess of injured bodies and wreckage.
“I am so sorry,” I sputter when Declan and I are alone.
The last conversation we had—the confession that left me gutted—feels so far away now. I thought I needed distance, thought I needed time to make sense of it, of us. But all that feels small and foolish in the face of him, broken and bleeding.
Declan’s dark irises find me, and even like this, even when he’s wounded and on the brink of death, they burn through me. He drags his hand across the sand-covered stage with a slow, stubborn effort until his fingers find mine.
“You’re here now.” His swallow is thick, and he winces on his next inhale. “That’s what matters.”
“Don’t talk. Save your strength—” I choke on the rest as tears prick my eyes, stream down my cheeks.
He tries to push himself up, and the movement seems to take every ounce of strength he has left. “I have to tell you—”
“Shh.” I shake my head frantically. “Declan, please.” I wrap my hands around his and squeeze like it’s the last time I’ll ever get to.
“Amanda, you need to hear this.” He sucks in a breath and bares his teeth against another wave of pain. “You’ve been acting your whole life. You think other people, the universe broke you.” His breath shudders out. “But they didn’t.”
I shake my head so hard it rattles my teeth. “Stop. Don’t—we don’t need to talk about that now.”
He squeezes my fingers and wets his cracked lips. “You broke yourself. You…walled off. Never let anyone get close enough to stay.”
A sob tears through me. I bend over him and press my forehead to his. “Please, Declan. Please, don’t leave me.”
“I wish you would have let me love you.”
The words land and split me open. Tears come hot and sudden. They run down my cheeks and drip onto his skin until they streak his face. I want him to be wrong, but the truth is, I wish I would have let him love me when I had the chance. I wish I would have loved myself.
“You still can. I want to let you.” I lean down and kiss him, my lips damp with copper and salt. “Stay with me, please.”
My hands are slick with his blood. They tremble so hard my fingers ache. I press down where the wound is. My breath is a ragged, convulsing thing. Sobs break free and rattle up my throat. They sound like the storm, wild and animal.
“I’ll fix this,” I promise. “I’ll—” I choke on the rest.
He squeezes my hand once more, thumb tracing the backs of my knuckles. “I love you, Amanda,” he breathes, voice tearing out of him like paper.
“I love you too.” I press my lips to his again, clinging, willing. “I love you.”
His fingers loosen. The squeeze unravels like a thread. A final breath trembles in his chest, small and brief, then the empty, sinking whoosh of it slipping away.
My brain offers me soft denials: it’ll be okay, this is temporary, you’re fine. But I’m not fine. I haven’t been for a long, long time.
The realization seeps in slowly, and I feel it like winter in my bones—cold, patient, impossible to shake. I broke myself. Not betrayal. Not abandonment. Not the universe turning its back.
Me.
I am the only one responsible for how my life has turned out.
Every betrayal left me wounded, but it wasn’t those cuts that left me bleeding. It was the armor I built after. The bitterness I spit before anyone could hurt me again. The walls so high no one could climb them.
It’s all here. It became this very storm. My fear transmuted into ruin.
The fear that I am powerless—so I clung to control in the form of affirmations and positivity until they burned everything in reach.
The fear that I am unlovable—so I created a smiling, love-and-light persona, and when that didn’t work, I lashed out, raged before rejection could land.
The fear that I will always be left behind and alone—so I forced others away thinking that if I could control how they left, it would hurt less, keep me safe.
The storm is every one of those fears made flesh. Alive now, tearing across the edges of the world with my voice in its throat, my fire in its veins.
“Remember!” The word lashes the sky, stitched into the throat of the storm.
“Nothing changes if nothing changes,” I whisper, and the words aren’t an empty affirmation. They’re a vow.
I broke this—myself, this kingdom, Declan—and I am the only one who can put it back together.
The storm claws at the stage and the rest of the camp, a living wound roiling up from the sand. Fire threads through the funnel of dust like veins lit from within, and the sound of it makes my teeth ache.
“Remember!”
Fortune wasn’t asking me to remember one moment, one lesson, one fixed truth. She wanted me to remember all of it—every scar, every joy, every sharp edge and soft place. A lifetime. My history. The collection of broken and burning pieces that made me into who I am.
And that’s what this kingdom needs too. Not a script or a performance. Not a single, polished story. It needs to remember itself—the whole of it. The fire and the ruin. The beauty and the grief. The truth it buried long ago.
Declan’s hand slides from mine as I push myself to my feet. The storm shoves me back, but I stay upright. My hair whips across my face, and sand bites at my skin like shards of glass. I know what to do.
I turn toward the storm and hurl my voice in a command that blazes a trail through the sky. “Hear me! I remember!”