Chapter Thirty-Nine
Rheda
Sleep takes me like a punishment.
One moment I am staring at the ceiling with my hand curled around the bracelet, thumb moving over the silver until the skin beneath it aches. The next, the room is gone, and cold air opens around me so violently my breath catches.
Stone.
Water.
The smell of old cloth left damp too long.
My stomach turns before I see him. Deogal is already on the floor. His hair hangs wet against his face, his shirt torn loose at one shoulder, skin marked in places my mind refuses to measure properly.
My breath shudders.
We’re back.
He’s taken me back to his torture.
The Friars stand around him in orange. This time, I notice little things, stupid things. The way the fabric looks patchy, darkened in some places and slightly washed out in others. The stitching that’s jagged at the hems. Blue thread.
It runs beneath the orange hems in ugly, uneven lines, bright where it should be hidden. It’s not decorative, not careful. The stitches are thick and crude, punched through fabric like wounds.
My gaze catches on it and something inside me recoils.
“They marked everything they owned,” Deogal says beside me. I flinch toward him. He is standing close now, whole and dry and terrible in the dark. His eyes are on the men. “Even mercy.”
Before I can answer, one of them takes the younger Deogal’s wrist. He shrieks like he knows what’s coming next. My own hand tightens instantly around my bracelet.
“No,” I whisper.
The Friar places Deogal’s arm against the stone with careful precision. Another kneels beside him, robes pooling orange around his knees.
Deogal starts shaking his head before they do anything. His mouth opens around a sound that doesn’t fully become speech. Panic hollows him out. He tries to pull back, weakly at first, then harder, chains scraping violently beneath him.
“Please,” he says.
My chest tears open around it.
The Friar only lowers his head, almost tenderly.
“Stay still,” he murmurs. Then he brings the iron down, and the crack detonates around the cell.
Deogal screams, and my own wrist explodes with pain. I stagger back, clutching it, but there is nowhere to go. The bracelet burns cold against my skin. Pain pulses beneath the silver, deep and bright and impossible, like the bone has split clean through me too.
I choke.
Deogal folds over his ruined hand, breath coming in broken, animal bursts. His fingers twitch wrong. One of the Friars catches his chin and lifts his face again, forcing him to look upward while tears spill hot down his cheeks.
I can’t breathe.
The older Deogal turns to me then. He watches my face instead of the torture. Watches the tears gathering, watches the way I cradle my wrist, watches my body breaking around pain that does not belong to it. His expression softens.
“Rheda,” he murmurs.
I shake my head, but he is already there. His hand finds my cheek, warm against skin gone cold with panic. His thumb moves slowly beneath my eye, catching a tear before it falls.
“Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
Another sound tears from the boy on the floor. My wrist throbs so violently my vision blurs.
“It hurts,” I whisper.
“I know.”
And God help me, I believe him. His hand slides to the back of my neck and draws me closer, not forcefully, not this time.
He holds me against him while I shake. My forehead presses to his chest. His fingers stroke slowly through my hair like I am the one who needs comforting.
Like I am the one who has survived something.
“They made me watch my own body become something useless,” he says quietly against my hair. “They taught me pain could be patient.”
Another sound tears through the chamber. It’s not screaming this time. Wet coughing.
I look up too late.
Water pours over the cloth again.
The younger Deogal convulses beneath it, chains shrieking sharply against stone while his body bucks in blind panic. His ruined wrist slams uselessly against the floor every time he thrashes.
The crack of bone echoes again inside my skull. My own wrist answers immediately. Pain detonates up my arm hard enough to make me gasp.
But another memory crashes over it before the word finishes.
Fingers digging into his jaw. Blood running down his throat. Orange cloth. Blue stitching.
Water.
Prayer.
Somebody humming softly while he chokes. The images begin overlapping too quickly after that. Knees bruised black. Fingers twitching wrong. A needle through skin.
My breathing turns ragged. “Deogal—”
He keeps holding me while it happens. His hand strokes slowly through my hair while his younger self drowns behind him. His thumb keeps wiping tears from my face with unbearable patience.
“Look at me,” he murmurs again.
I try.
I genuinely try.
But the chamber won’t stop. The Friars blur and sharpen and blur again. One presses something glowing against Deogal’s shoulder and the smell hits me immediately.
Burning flesh.
I choke on the scream. My body starts shaking harder.
“Please,” I gasp.
“Shh.” His mouth brushes my temple. “You wanted this.”
My throat tightens around a sob.
The chamber won’t stop. Every sound is inside me now.
No.
I can’t.
I—
“Enough!” The word rips out of me violently. I don’t even realise I’ve said it until the chamber goes still.
His entire body stills. The hand in my hair comes loose immediately. Heat leaves with it. I feel the loss before I understand what caused it. The chamber suddenly feels colder.
My stomach drops.
“No,” I say quickly, breath snagging. “No, I didn’t mean—”
Deogal steps back. It feels catastrophic.
The younger version of him is still shaking on the floor behind us, coughing water onto stone, but Deogal isn’t looking at him anymore. He’s looking at me. Hurt. God, somehow that expression is worse than anger.
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately. Panic starts climbing hard into my throat. “I’m sorry, I just—I couldn’t—”
“You asked to see me.”
His voice is quiet now.
“I know.” Tears spill down my face. “I know, I know, I’m sorry—”
“No.” His eyes stay fixed on mine. “You wanted the parts of me that would make you love me.”
The sentence slices straight through my chest.
“That’s not true.”
“No?” His gaze drops briefly to the bracelet around my wrist. “Then why are you frightened now?”
I realise too late what I’ve done.
“Please,” I say quickly. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.”
My hand reaches for him before I can stop it. He lets me almost touch him, then withdraws another inch. The rejection lands like a slap.
The words settle beneath my skin before I can reject them. For a second, I feel the chamber around me too clearly—the wet stone, the ruined breathing behind him, the cold bite of silver around my wrist.
He steps back again.
The distance opens like a wound. “Deogal—”
But the torchlight has already begun to gutter. One flame folds into darkness, then another. His face is the last thing to go, watching me with that quiet, disappointed patience until even that is swallowed.
The chamber empties, but the pain does not. My hand clamped around my wrist so tightly my nails have left half-moon marks in the skin. The bracelet is cold beneath my palm.
For several seconds, I can’t move. I just stare at it. Silver links. Red skin beneath. Pain pulsing deep where no injury should be. I press my thumb against the bone and nearly sob when it answers.
It felt broken. It still feels broken.
And the worst part is not the pain. The worst part is that he’s gone. He left me. And the absence hits so hard I wake choking on the grief of it.