Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
I walked down the tunnels without direction, taking countless turns until I came to a set of rooms dug into the walls of a corridor, forming a sort of abandoned barracks. We had to be deep within the mountains now. But the rooms had doors, which meant privacy.
I chose an empty one, devoid of most comforts save for battered furniture, and marched across the threshold, eyes locked on a pair of shutters set into the wall. I only turned when I heard Malakai close the door.
Looking at him nearly shattered my resolve, everything from the past weeks rushing in at once—roaring in my ears and clouding my vision. Before I even fully had him back, I felt as if I had lost him again.
He knew. He knew.
For over two years, I wandered aimlessly, a lost soul amid a sea of abandonment, holding out hope that he would come back to me.
Yet Malakai had walked away from me that day knowing he would not return.
Knowing that my world would shift, my heart would shatter, and he still made that choice to leave me in the dark.
Because that was what it was—a choice. One that took away my own autonomy and set rage curdling in my gut.
My parting words to him echoed in my mind.
Come back to me.
Come back to me.
Come back to me.
And yet, he did not.
His jaw tensed when my face shifted into a razor-sharp glare. The dim mystlight in the corners of the room illuminated the remnants of blood, dirt, and scars covering his skin.
“Ophelia,” he started, voice so low that if I hadn’t been watching his lips move, I wouldn’t have known he had spoken.
“No,” I interrupted, stepping farther away in the small space.
The back of my legs met a writing desk, and I let it support me, my hand coming to my throat to hold back the sobs that had built up since I first laid eyes on him.
I’d forced them down, but now that I faced the truth—faced him—the hot sting in my eyes was overwhelming. “How could you—” I whispered.
My question was cut off when I met his haunted stare, but he understood. How could you lie? How could he break the one thing I was so sure of—break us—by lying to me?
“I couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t have let me go if you knew.” He appeared somewhere between desperation and anger. If he had one minute or one century left to live, he would spend it trying to make me understand.
And he was right. Had I known that he was walking away for good, I never would have let him go. My fate be damned, he mattered more than my life.
But still— “You. Left.” My whisper sliced through the air, sharp with accusation.
“I never wanted to.” Frustration broke his voice, the low timbre like a storm waiting to unleash its first clap of thunder.
“You walked away and did not return.” My shout strained my throat, and I threw my arms out. “You knew you would not return.”
“Lying was my only choice.” He clenched his hands repeatedly before turning and slamming his palms against the wall. “Fuck,” he muttered.
The muscles in his back rippled beneath their scars as he took a second to breathe. When he turned back to me, he leaned forward, hands open before him as if searching for an answer. “What was I supposed to do? It was the only way to keep you safe.”
“My safety is my choice, Malakai. We could have found a way together.”
“They wouldn’t have allowed it. They wanted me, Ophelia.
” He placed a hand on his chest, both bracing himself and emphasizing the harsh reality.
“They wanted me in exchange for Mystique power. To consolidate it and corrupt it. And Kakias wanted to torture me as her own Spirits-damned toy to get revenge on my father for even having me, and he was—I don’t know what happened to him, but he was different.
He let her do that to me. But no one besides them knew that you were the rightful heir to the position, so I thought if I left, it would hide my father’s shameful plan and keep you safe.
They promised you would not be harmed if I gave myself up. ” His voice rose with each truth.
“As if you should have believed them!” I raged. “They would have used me anyway.” Paired me as the Engrossian prince’s submissive partner or killed me outright—somehow they would have used me.
“I didn’t know that!” The storm within him finally broke, and he shouted, “I did what I had to do, and I would do it again.”
His panting breaths filled the tense space between us.
“I will not have my future controlled, Malakai. Not only did you keep your family’s secrets, but you hid my blood right from me, as well.” Did he not see how twisted his decisions were?
“I’m sorry for not consulting you, but what choice did I have?”
I inhaled, fighting through my anger for a moment to see the pain in his eyes. Malakai was not the root of this problem. “Lucidius brought shame upon himself.” Malakai recoiled at his father’s name, a knife to my gut. But Lucidius should feel that remorse, not Malakai.
“Listen to me,” I tried to speak calmly, waiting for his eyes to meet mine before I continued.
“He is the only one that should have been ashamed of his actions.” Ashamed for offering up his own son in search of power he masqueraded as love.
Ashamed for turning his back on the Mystiques who trusted him.
Malakai took a deep breath, letting my words settle. “I know you think I took your choice from you, but my father played the only game I would let him win. He knew that if he threatened you, then he would have me under his thumb.”
I couldn’t take this. Spirits, I couldn’t take any of these truths. I sank further into the desk behind me, fingers curling around the edge until the wood bit into my flesh.
“Fuck them,” I spat. “Fuck the Spirits and the Angels and all of them. We would have found a way. Together. As we always should have been.”
He shook his head. “The only reason I could leave was because I knew it was keeping you safe. If you had given yourself over, and they had tortured you as they did me…” He swallowed heavily over the end of the sentence, shuddering.
“I would have lived centuries in this Spirit-forsaken hole, faced any means of torture, if it meant you would live out your days happily.”
I scoffed, hot tears cutting a path through the dirt and blood on my cheeks. “Happy? Do you know how I spent these past two years, Malakai?”
He shook his head again, hair brushing his shoulders, eyes not leaving mine.
I ran shaking hands through my hair, forcing myself to keep speaking, to make him understand my anger so maybe I could keep it from turning into a toxic leech between us.
“I spent them searching, desperately hoping to find a way to restore our lives. Clinging to the piece of my soul that insisted you weren’t dead, only to find out that you knew what you were facing when you left me, and you hid it from me.
When you did that, you broke something in me.
” I wanted to tear the room apart, throw something only to watch it break as irreparably as his decisions had shattered what had mattered most to me.
“Did this mean nothing?” I shoved my left arm forward, brandishing the Bind and the fresh set of white scars wrapped around my forearm.
“To me, this meant that we were partners—that we faced life together. Yet you knew these secrets and chose to face them without me. You may as well have burned this from my body.”
He recoiled at the scars both on my body and within it. The exact pain he wished to avoid by leaving me. If possible, the shadows in his face darkened. The avoidance of his eyes tightened my chest with the realization of an even worse truth.
“Did you know when we received the Bind?”
His whole body tensed. “I didn’t know. Not everything—”
“You said this was so that we could always come back to each other!” I screamed, voice cracking, fingers locking around the Bind until my nails dug into my flesh. “It was all lies.”
“I didn’t know everything, Ophelia!” Now he was shouting, too—a wild tangle of desperation, anger, and hurt seeping from every part of him. “I was figuring it out, if you will let me explain myself.”
I had no interest in excuses, but I remained silent.
“I hadn’t trusted my father since the war began.
The last time I had seen him—after the Curse first appeared—his lack of concern…
It made me want to push him from the top of the mountains myself, the Spirit-forsaken bastard.
” He ran a hand through his matted curls, fingers getting caught on the way back.
The shock of everything I hadn’t known about these pivotal moments of my life froze me.
Malakai cleared his throat. “Before the treaty was signed, he returned to Palerman for one night to see me. To threaten me, actually. At that point, I had my suspicions about his loyalties, but even I hadn’t imagined the full extent of his history.
Or his plans.” He sighed, his eyes falling closed.
“I had seen the bloodshed, Ophelia. Had seen the orphaned children and families in mourning. Me signing the treaty—agreeing to hand myself over—it would stop all of that. You can’t expect me to have not agreed.
What is my life when it could save so many others? ”
To me, it was everything.
But he was right. If I had had the power to save so many, I would have sacrificed myself.
This was bigger than my pain, bigger than us.
This was about the unfair deaths of thousands of warriors in an avoidable war.
Shame at my own selfishness swept over me, but it did not wash away the taint of his betrayals.
“You should have told me from the moment you first suspected your father.”
“A part of me wanted to deny it all. He was my father—” His voice broke over the word. “Part of me didn’t want it to be true.”