CHAPTER 91 ROHAN
ROHAN
Rohan had never believed himself to be either a hero or a villain.
But I played the hero well enough. More fool, I.
A grand sacrifice, a romantic gesture, and all of it had been for naught.
Twisting the metal quill between his fingers, Rohan tried his best to focus on what mattered now: the remaining players and the board.
That seemed a better use of whatever time he had left than focusing on the undeniable fact that if he made it out of here alive, he would have nothing, be nothing.
“The whole damn sky.” Toby spoke for the first time in a small eternity. He locked his eyes on to Rohan’s. As green as Toby’s irises were, they might as well have been pools of darkness.
Rohan waited for Toby to explain what he’d just said, but Rohan tired of waiting before Toby tired of saying nothing. “Care to elaborate?”
Toby closed the space between them a bit, and Rohan reconsidered his appraisal of the other man’s eyes. They weren’t depthless pools. They were live-wire eyes, electric and charged and on the verge.
“The whole damn sky.” There was something raw in Toby’s words, something uncomfortably sure. “That’s what you give her. If you make it out, if you get the chance, you give her your everything, on bended knee if you have to—the world and the whole damn sky.”
“I already gave up everything,” Rohan replied. More fool, I.
“I didn’t say everything. I said your everything, and I didn’t say to give it up. I said to give it to her. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not in the mood for a lecture, Mr. Hawthorne.” Rohan offered up a hard-edged smile. “Or is this closer to last rites?”
There was a flicker in those very Hawthorne eyes then, the slightest of tells, and Rohan realized…
“It is, isn’t it?” Rohan considered that, considered the man before him. “Last rites—but not for me. When these doors open, you don’t intend to run to safety, do you?”
“I have spent my life running.” There was a low hum of energy in Toby’s voice now. “But wherever you go in this life, you can’t outrun yourself.”
Rohan should have had an automatic, appropriately sardonic reply to that, but nothing came.
Nothing.
Nihil.
There was no reason for Rohan to be thinking of Savannah now. None. What was done was done, and in all likelihood, Savannah Grayson would never know just how well he’d played the hero. Rohan was certainly never going to tell her.
“Just out of curiosity…” Rohan cast his focus outward, raking his gaze up and down the man opposite him, over burn scars, white with age, on Toby’s chest. “What do you intend to do when the door opens, Mr. Hawthorne? If it opens.”
“It’s hardly likely to be me.” Toby turned away from Rohan and toward the wall of blades.
“That’s the exact phrase your duchess used when I asked her to save my daughters.
She indicated that only one of them needed saving, and then she said, If you’re looking for a savior, it’s hardly likely to be me.
That phrase—it’s something my mother said to me once.
I broke out of a room just like the one we woke up in, a replica she must have built at some point.
I assumed the maze chamber was my father’s doing, and my mother played along with that assumption and said, It’s hardly likely to have been mine. ”
“Not an exact match,” Rohan commented.
“Because the duchess indeed will not be the one to save either of my daughters. However…”
“You think it was a message from your mother?” Rohan considered that.
“I think that my mother expects one of my daughters to make it through this,” Toby said roughly, “and that she knows for a fact that I would die for either of them. I think my mother knows me well enough to know that if this door opens, I’ll run—but not to safety.
Eventually our path out of this hellhole will fork, Rohan, and you and I will part ways, because if there’s any way for me to run toward what matters instead of away, I’ll take it.
” Toby’s eyes closed, just for a moment. “No matter the cost.”
Rohan thought about Katalin Aquila Reyes telling Toby that his Hannah was dust on the wind.
He really means that—no matter the cost. Rohan shouldn’t have cared that Toby Hawthorne was in the state of mind to bargain with Death himself, and Rohan certainly shouldn’t have taken a step toward Toby to press the metal quill, the closest thing to a weapon Rohan had, into Toby’s hand, arming him the only way he could.
“In case you run into resistance,” Rohan said nonchalantly, “heading into the fray.”
Toby clapped a hand around Rohan’s forearm and held it. Just… held it for the longest time, like Rohan was the one dangling over the edge of the cliff and Toby would not let him go.
“The world and the whole damn sky,” Toby said.
And then without warning or preamble, the entire wall of blades swung outward.
When the doors open, run.
Toby dropped Rohan’s arm, and Rohan ran. Chamber after chamber, door after open door, Rohan did not hesitate, not even for a second, not even when the last chamber let out into a small cavern off which there were two natural tunnels.
Rohan went left. Behind him, Toby went right, and less than a minute later, when the first explosion sounded from the depths, like the distant rumble of thunder, Rohan didn’t let himself think about what that meant for Toby Hawthorne.
And then there was another explosion. And a third. And then…
A chain reaction. Like dominoes falling one after another. It wouldn’t be long now. Alone in the world, Rohan ran full blast into darkness, toward life, as stone began to audibly crack all around him.
As the world began to crumble.