11. Scars of Guilt
Atlas
All I had wanted was to stay.
To pull her back against my chest, bury my face in her hair, and let the rest of the world rot for a few hours more.
She should not even have been here. She should have been safe on the other side of the Rift.
A whole world away from war and darkness and the brother I had so very nearly murdered with my own hand.
Yet if she had stayed where I’d left her, where I had ordered her to remain, then Lazaros would be dead.
And as for me, I would be a man with nothing left inside.
And that was the impossible truth of it. I couldn’t even wish she had done as I’d ordered and stayed away, because had she obeyed me, every one of us would now be dead.
But she hadn’t. She never did as she was told.
And this time, that stubborn, infuriating defiance had saved us all.
I drew the door closed behind me with the exaggerated care of a man defusing a weapon, holding my breath as though that might somehow soften the latch.
It clicked anyway, far too loud in the hush of the castle, and I stood there for a moment longer than I should have.
My palm flat against the wood, listening to the silence on the other side.
For too long, I had lived inside noise. The clash of steel and the screams of the dying, the endless thunder of an army on the march.
The wet, tearing sounds the corrupted made when the darkness wore them like puppets.
Now there was only stillness, and somehow that unsettled me more.
Every breath echoed. Every heartbeat felt magnified.
As though peace itself were holding its breath, waiting.
It was right to.
Because the one responsible still walked free somewhere beneath this fragile calm.
Demetrios.
I didn’t even know him beyond being my brother’s second-in-command, and now I knew him as the shadowed face of evil that had slithered from the corner of my own throne room. That and the shape of what he had done. And whatever it cost me, I would learn the rest.
For now, though, I was just a man walking the silent halls toward my own office, where my brother and my oldest friend were waiting on me, with the taste of her still on my lips and a knot of guilt sitting heavy in my chest.
There was a question that had been gnawing at me since the dust settled in the throne room, though it was not the one that ought to have been at the forefront of my mind.
For I already knew how they had reached me.
Alexandra had let that much slip in the heat of our argument that they would never have made it back in time without the help of the Gorgon King.
No, it wasn’t the how that troubled me. It was everything wrapped around it.
Theron of House Chrysaor did not lift a finger for any living creature without exacting his price.
And the question of what that price had been, of why she had looked away rather than name it, sat in my chest like I had swallowed fire.
Aster would have the rest of it. Aster always did.
A guilt that had a name walked beside me the whole way.
Lazaros.
I had been unkind to him. I knew that. When my blade had opened his throat in the throne room, I had believed I was cutting down a traitor.
The brother who had betrayed me and set two worlds to burning.
I had not known then what Alexandra did.
That the man swaying before me was no traitor at all, only a victim with another man’s hand wrapped around his will.
And when the darkness finally loosened its grip and left him kneeling in his own blood, confused and broken and asking what he had done, I had given him suspicion where I should have given him compassion.
Even when he faltered on the steps above the battlefield, even as Aster and I caught him between us and carried him back through the castle toward the healers, I had kept one hand near my sword. Watching him. Waiting. Half expecting Demetrios to rise up behind his eyes once more.
I had carried my own brother to safety and mourned him in the same breath, as though some part of me still couldn’t believe he was truly mine again.
And that, more than the blade, was the thing I could not forgive myself for.
And yet, set beside the weight my brother carried, my own guilt was a small and selfish thing.
Because there was another grave in the royal crypt, and it had been Lazaros’s hand that put it there.
Our father.
Cut down within his own walls by the son.
All the while Demetrios sat behind my brother’s eyes and wore him like a glove.
Lazaros remembered little of the doing of it, he had told me.
Only the after. Only after coming back to himself with the memory of infecting our father with the power of darkness.
One intended only to kill, not to consume like it had our people.
It was why I, with the rest of my kingdom, believed he had simply given in to his grief and died broken-hearted.
An illness born from nature, not from the evil that had taken over my brother and wielded his hand.
Yet the guilt remained, no matter the truth of it.
I had said all the things a brother was meant to say.
That it was not him. That it was the darkness, the thief who had stolen his will and turned his body into a blade.
That no man alive could be held to answer for a crime worked with another’s hand upon the hilt.
I had said it at his bedside in the infirmary, his blood barely dry.
I had said it until the words wore smooth as river stones and meant nothing at all.
And still it had not touched him. The guilt had only folded itself away behind that easy, crooked grin of his. To a place where he believed I could no longer see it, though it went on quietly devouring him from the inside. I knew the look of it far too well. I had worn it myself.
So, when he smiled at me and made his jokes and pretended at a lightness he did not feel, I let him. Because I understood exactly what it cost him to wear it, and I had not yet found the words that would let him set it down.
The office door stood ajar when I reached it, voices drifting through the gap, and I pushed it open to find the pair of them exactly where Aster had promised they would be.
Lazaros stood bent over my desk, sleeves pushed to his elbows, sorting through the chaos that had once been my carefully ordered study. Aster had folded himself into the chair beside the cold hearth, one boot propped on the opposite knee.
My brother looked up at the sound of the door, lifted a fistful of documents, and gave me that lopsided grin I had not seen in far too long.
“Yeah,” he said. “It looks a bit different from the last time you were here. Sorry.”
He was right. My office had surrendered entirely to dust and disorder, papers strewn across the floor, sunlight catching the motes that hung thick in the air. But I cared nothing for the state of the room. My only concern stood behind the desk, breathing, smiling…
Alive.
I crossed to him without a word, took his chin in my hand, and tilted his head to inspect the wound at his throat. He let me, rolling his eyes the entire time.
The stitches had already been removed, and the cut faded to a dusty pink. It would be barely noticeable once fully healed. I pressed two fingers against the side of his neck anyway. Just to feel the pulse there. Just to be certain it was real. That Alexandra had not been too late.
“You’ll be fully healed in no time,” I said, hating how rough my voice sounded. How obviously the guilt bled through it.
Lazaros batted my hand away with a sharp flick.
“Look at you, big brother,” he said, grin widening. “Getting all caring these days.”
“Careful,” Aster drawled from his chair without opening his eyes. “Keep talking like that, and he’ll start writing poetry next, and I wonder why… or should I say I wonder who is responsible,” he teased with a smirk.
I shot him a look he did not bother to acknowledge, then huffed something that was almost a laugh before sinking into the chair behind the desk. I dragged both hands down my face.
“I can’t believe what nearly happened.”
“Well,” Lazaros said lightly, perching on the edge of the desk, “thankfully, your little mortal turned up.”
“Yes.” I let my head fall back. “I still can’t believe she’s here.” Not that I was complaining. I had missed her more than a star misses the night sky.
“So,” Lazaros drew the word out, watching me with the sharp, knowing look our mother used to wear. “A mortal. She crossed the Rift. Came through, God knows what… For you.” His brow arched. “Seems an awful lot of trouble to go to for a man who left her behind.”
“Careful,” I said, the warning low in my chest before I could stop it.
His eyebrows shot toward his hairline.
“Oh,” he said slowly, delight curling across his face. “So, she actually matters to you.”
I narrowed my eyes, surprised that it was not plain to him, surprised it was not written across every word I spoke and every breath I took.
“Alexandra matters a great deal.”
“How so?” He tilted his head, all open curiosity now, the teasing gentling into something quieter. And because he was my brother, because I had so very nearly lost him and the truth had grown too large to keep behind my teeth, I gave it to him.
“I found my fated.”
Lazaros went still.
His mouth parted, the breath leaving him in a rush, and all he could do was stare at me as though I had told him the sun had fallen out of the sky. Then, slowly, a smile broke through the shock, warm and real and aching at the edges.
“Then some good came of all this,” he said, more to himself. From the chair by the hearth, Aster finally opened his eyes.
“Yeah, and it only took him three years and an apocalypse to admit it out loud,” he said. “I had begun to lose hope.”