Chapter 52
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
FINLAY
Finlay stares down at the ink blot bleeding into the parchment, seeping through the fibers like an infection. The quill is limp in his hand, the sun blinking awake behind him. His breath is shallow and trembling against his lips as he considers and reflects.
Is he really going to send this letter to Master Cahlmon, going against his brother for the second time and betraying his trust by leaking their whereabouts? Is he really going to turn in the girl who Draven has chosen to attach his life to?
Finlay himself doesn’t particularly care about her. He doesn’t even particularly like her. Yet against all odds, he’s grown to respect her over their time of travel. Despite her common blood and lowborn status—a fact of which has been feeling less and less relevant.
Truthfully, it is as though leaving the Wastelands behind and seeking refuge in the Anatolé Kingdom with Lyra Izacalli—hell, with all the nontitled lot of them, really, seeing as Draven and Finlay are the only true purebreds—made something shift inside him.
As though after everything he’s experienced and felt since the Winter Solstice has accumulated into a small seed, the kernel planted deep in his gut, and he can no longer ignore the way it is blossoming.
Or perhaps it wasn’t an accumulation at all.
Perhaps it is just one simple thing. One person.
Images of Rhea wrapped in his arms, pressed tightly against his chest, appear in his mind.
Images that remind him of the way he nestled into her, haunted and desperate to feel something good after the ward forced him to swallow such searing pain.
Images that remind him of how his heart stuttered in his chest while holding her.
Of how right it felt to have her in his arms. A moment which they have yet to discuss or acknowledge, instead seeming to pretend like it never happened at all. Still…
He knows what Rhea would say about his decision should he send the letter containing their coordinates. Their plans. She would hate him for it—more than she already does. If he sends this letter, she would never forgive him; he would be truly irredeemable in her eyes. In Draven’s, too.
The terrible ache the thought causes in his chest is not lost on him.
Yet he also knows what his father would say to him.
What his father would tell him to do. And if news of Finlay being the one to hand deliver Lyra’s whereabouts to Bathara ever reached his father, especially after the small nod of approval he received during the masquerade ball, he may finally be welcomed back home.
May finally experience what it feels like to have his father look at him with something other than hatred and disdain in his eyes.
But the cost…
Finlay drops his head, the weight of what he must do pressing against his sternum as he sees his paths diverging so clearly from all that he wants.
It screams at his instincts. Dismantles every carefully laid stone built into his foundation.
He knows better. Knows he should not do what it is he is about to do.
It’s hard to feel like you’re enough when the only proof of love you’ve ever had is reliant on what you can or cannot give.
Finlay rights himself, realizing what it is he must remember. He tightens his grip on the shaft of the quill, his features smoothing out with acceptance, his eyes now lined with resolve.
He hunches over the desk, and he writes.