Chapter 55
Chapter Fifty-Five
Emmeline
Nico’s blood was…everywhere.
On the dagger beside his body.
Sticking beneath her boots, coating the hem of her dress and cloak.
Painting Roremar’s hands and cheeks and the stone of the altar.
“No, this can’t have happened,” Roremar was still muttering to himself. “I kept him safe. I kept them all safe. Not this…not…” He clutched Nico tighter to his chest.
Emmeline’s entire body was numb with the terror and devastation rolling off him. The air tasted of salty tears and iron as she took shallow, gasping breaths. The lingering incense made her head spin.
She forced herself to step closer. Forced a hand to Roremar’s quaking shoulder and her lips to form his name again.
At the contact, Roremar jumped, her heart racing with it, and he spun toward her. His eyes were such a dark grey, they were nearly black in the dim candlelight, gaze flicking hurriedly around the cell as if he was searching for something to make sense of all of this.
She longed desperately to help him. A part of her soul withered further into devastation with each ticking second.
“Emmeline,” he whispered. “I—I didn’t mean—You can’t be here.”
A commotion echoed through the cells, boots on stone and distant voices.
Her grip tightened on his shoulder. “I know, Rore. I’m here for you, though,” Emmeline tried to soothe, but her own voice was shaking. Tears rolled down her cheeks, her chest ripped in two. “I’m not leaving you.”
Nico…Fates, what was going on here? How had this happened? Not Nico. He was so good. With his charming smiles and genuine care. With how desperately he pursued Myrella, eyes lighting up each time she gave him a moment of attention.
Spirits, Myrella. This was going to devastate her, too. She’d been holding back from Nico, but Emmeline saw how much she cared—how much it scared her.
And their mother…Leo, Vivienne, and Siena…
None of them deserved this. Nico didn’t deserve this. He was working so hard to be a good brother, to take the load off Roremar’s shoulders. All he’d wanted was to help.
Emmeline forced down all her emotions, trying to be steady. Later, she’d mourn. Later.
She cupped Roremar’s cheeks. Nico’s blood was sticky beneath her fingers, smeared from where Roremar had held him close. He flinched at the touch.
“Talk to me,” she whispered.
“No, no,” he repeated, wincing as she dragged her thumbs over his cheekbones. The words weren’t to her, they were to some far-off person, like he was begging the Fates to turn back time and rewrite this fortune.
“Roremar, I need you to tell me what happened,” Emmeline said, trying to speak slowly and hold his attention. Trying to keep him together, this man who always held everyone else up.
Those distant voices drew closer, cell doors swinging on rusty hinges as they threw them open in their hunt for her. They must have followed her down here when the clerk alerted them of her trespassing.
“Tell me how you got here,” she pleaded as their shouts choked her. “What were you two doing?”
At that word—two—Roremar’s gaze dropped to Nico. He clutched him tighter, fingers nearly shredding his brother’s woven tunic as he gripped the neckline, hands coated with blood and dirt.
So much blood coated the two of them. As she had when her mother died, Emmeline wondered how it all came from one body.
Why did it seem so much worse the second time?
As if her distant memory had tried to paint over the image, soften it in her childhood mind, but this time it dragged up all the feelings of both deaths. Slammed them into her with each breath.
“I—I—” Roremar stuttered again, adjusting Nico’s body in his arms. “I can fix this.”
Nico’s tunic slipped open.
And that was when Emmeline noticed it—the fresh tattoo on his chest. An uneven, twelve-pointed star with other markings around it, visible through a slash to the neckline.
The slit throat.
The dark smudges peeking through the blood on Roremar’s hands.
Her heart could have stopped beating in that moment. She took a step back as the footsteps in the corridor drew closer.
“Roremar,” she whispered.
The incense in the air was dizzying, slowing her brain from piecing it together. Or perhaps that was her own denial.
But she couldn’t stop it when Roremar’s devastation morphed into disgust that tugged at her heart. Not as the instinct to drive a blade into her own chest deepened.
She willed him to shake his head, to see the questions forming in her eyes and provide some sort of explanation.
But he only looked at her. And nodded.
Soldiers in the navy regalia of Lyra Isle Guard stormed into the cell as Emmeline fell to her knees. They shouted, but she couldn’t make sense of their words.
She was seven years old again, listening to her sister’s screams as she was taken from their home. She was nine, saying goodbye to her father for the last time. She was eleven, hidden beneath a rickety bed as what was left of her world turned to ruins.
She was losing everything again.
Through tunneling vision, she watched as they pulled Nico from his brother’s arms. Watched as they secured heavy iron cuffs around the wrists of the man she thought she knew.
Watched as once again, the person she’d let in was ripped away.
The tugging thread in her chest went wild.
Why wasn’t he fighting back?
Why wasn’t he standing up for himself?
Why wasn’t he telling them the truth of whatever had happened here?
The blood on his cheeks.
The ash on his hands.
There was no way.
Emmeline squeezed her eyes tight, willing the stinging to stop, but budding tears rolled down her cheeks.
Roremar wasn’t fighting the guards. The thread in her chest went deathly still, giving in to despair. She leaned forward on her palms, hand landing on a small metal circle. One of Roremar’s rings. It must have fallen off.
Absent-mindedly, as they took him away and one of the guards tried to speak with her about what she found, Emmeline slipped it into her pocket. She wasn’t sure why, but she was so confused, and though betrayal and denial were still warping through her, she wanted that small band of metal.
Roremar’s footsteps dragged down the corridor as if he was barely able to stand, and it was his lack of resistance that forced the senseless thought to surface.
Roremar Silventa was the murderer they’d been trying to find this entire time.
And he’d just killed his own brother.