Chapter 32
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Kai rose from her crouch, chest tight as her world buckled inward, and stood over Atsadi’s accuser.
Raphail’s mottled skin streamed with sweat, and saliva pooled in his mouth and bubbled around his teeth. He sat like a stone as the scorchbane burned through his system—every move must have felt like dying.
She wished he had died. She wished she didn’t know this.
Footsteps scrambled across the room toward Atsadi, but she couldn’t watch. She couldn’t look at the man who had nothing but patience and kindness for her. She couldn’t bear to see the tattoo he’d inked with her and Fala in mind.
She’d trusted him.
They both had.
Kai didn’t know how it happened, and it didn’t matter. Atsadi had pulled her in like a frog into cool water, then lit the fire under her pot.
Fala faced their husband. “Speak for yourself,” she demanded.
Tse and Doli held Atsadi by the arms, though he didn’t struggle.
Atsadi only shook his head and met Kai’s gaze, his jaw muscles flaring. “Kai, I do not know this man.”
He was so good at sounding earnest.
“I don’t believe you.”
Atsadi flinched like she'd struck him. "Then look me in the eye.” He stepped forward despite Tse and Doli’s grip. "Tell me what you see."
Kai couldn’t help herself—she looked. And there he was.
Atsadi. The man who once shared her fear of marriage.
The one who held Fala’s hands as if they were gentle flowers.
Who put his body before hers—not because she couldn’t defend herself, but because he decided he would share the burden of every battle.
He would be their fortress.
Fala had always been the heart of their marriage, and Kai the solid ground. Somewhere along the way, Atsadi had become their safe place to land, to release those duties without fear of their entire lives crumbling.
Somewhere along the way, Kai had started to love him.
Atsadi relaxed only slightly and held Kai’s attention. "I have never spoken with that man in my life." His voice was low, steady. "I swore to protect you and Fala, to honor this union, not because the gods demanded it, but because I chose to.”
Beside her, Raphail sniffed wetly.
She spun to him. “You named my husband. Do you recognize him?”
The prisoner didn’t even bother to look. “We never met. I only know he had access to the mines.”
From the far side of the room, Atsadi said, “Everyone has access.”
Technically, that was true, though it was limited outside the assigned miners. Atsadi, being an architect, had free range of them all.
Atsadi’s gaze shifted to Fala. “Cut me open and apply the scorchbane. I have nothing to confess to. You will see.”
Shadi pulled Kai aside and kept her tone low. “We must consider all possibilities.”
“What other possibilities could there be? Atsadi has been named. It is done.”
The words tasted bitter rolling off her tongue.
Shadi shook her head. “The Eternal One is a liar, too, then? She said you should trust him. This commander has never seen him, and Usti is clever enough to know what this lie would do—”
“How can you, of all people, stand in support of him? You have hated this union from the second it was announced. Here is your chance to annul it. Take it,” she finished on a hissed breath.
Take him from us, she wanted to beg. Take the choice from her hands because she didn’t want to decide this on her own. It was too hard. It hurt too much.
Shadi shifted weight to her back foot. “I cannot take what the gods have given. He is yours for a reason we cannot see yet.” To her consorts, she said, “We will hold Atsadi here until this has been resolved. No one else needs to hear of this. Not yet.”
Fala wiped a tear from her face but lengthened her spine. “His family will question his absence.”
“Then we will have to work fast,” Shadi said. “It is the only thing we can do.”
Atsadi offered another solution. “If you wish for more time, hide Fala and Kai as well. It will be assumed we have stolen away to consummate our union in private.”
Kai’s stomach turned, but she nodded. “He’s right.”
There was space for them all here. They wouldn’t have the comforts of home, but they would have privacy. And she would be near enough to keep an eye on her prisoners.
Shadi squeezed Kai’s hand. “I will get to the bottom of this. I swear it.”
Kai tore her hand away. “Do what you must. I’m going to find my answers elsewhere.”
She strode for the exit, passing Atsadi, who watched her every move.
“Kai,” he implored.
Like a fish on a hook, she rocked to a stop and slowly followed the lure of his voice. “What?”
Atsadi’s head cocked to the side and lines burrowed deep grooves through the tattoo between his brows. “I never broke my word to you. Please.”
“Please, what?” she asked, but her voice cracked on the last word.
“Please trust me.”
Kai snapped free from his gaze and started for the exit. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
She didn’t know what she was sorry for—doubting him, believing him, or loving him at all.
Kai didn’t simply climb the steps to the Unseen Clan’s hexagonal chamber—she tore up them with her fists in tight balls and her breath seething.
Trust.
Trust.
The Eternal One dismissed Kai’s fears and named Atsadi during the ceremony. She’d known full well the kind of male he was. All the while assuring her that he was safe. She’d let him near Fala—that was unforgivable.
The hum of voices washed over her as she neared the top, pulling her like an invisible hand, and Kai charged into the torch-lit chamber.
Dozens of the robed Unseen surrounded the Llinunae Stone or crowded the gold-veined walls, lines burrowed between their eyes.
Some picked at the stone wall; fragments of rock turned to dust and fell to the floor, revealing newly formed cracks and holes.
“We must—” the Eternal One was saying to them, hands lifted. She stopped upon Kai’s abrupt entrance, and her arms collapsed. “Welcome, Kai Silver Wolf.”
“Don’t welcome me just yet.” Kai’s chest heaved for breath, and she swept a hot glare across the room.
“Our mountain faces collapse. Our people face extinction, and what are you doing to help? Do you think yourself untouchable here? Those men crossed oceans and seas to take our home. They traveled through extreme cold to pit their swords against us. If we fall, you fall with us.”
“Kai—” the Eternal One began, pushing through the throng.
“No.” Pain throbbed inside her chest, and her throat tightened. Her next words strained on the way out. “You put him in my marriage bed.”
Literally or figuratively, it didn’t matter.
Kai had begun to consider what her marriage would be like with him in their bed.
In their home. She’d let him walk her through rooms he’d been shaping with his own hands and imagined herself there.
Fala’s eyes had brightened with hope. For a little while, Kai and Fala would become mothers to his children.
They were a family.
What the Eternal One had done to them was unforgivable.
The Eternal One glanced around at her people. “Leave us, please.”
As the Unseen shuffled out, the seer, Soyala, remained behind in her black robes, her black hair long and straight, her black eyes all-knowing.
“It’s all right, Soyala,” the Eternal One said. “I can explain.”
“If you’re sure.”
The gray-robed woman nodded. “See to the others. Answer their questions if you can.”
The seer followed the last of the Unseen with only a single glance back, then disappeared.
Alone, the Eternal One smiled. “I’d ask you to sit, but I don’t believe you will.”
“Atsadi is a traitor to our people. Did you know?”
The woman’s expression fell, then her gaze, then her shoulders. She sank onto the stone bench beside the Llinunae Stone. “Tell me what’s happened.”
Kai paced in long strides, arms folded tight, and recounted everything she knew.
From the moment the Perean unit arrived to Atsadi being named their accomplice.
She went silent and still after that part, refusing to acknowledge the minutes that came after.
Atsadi’s desperation to get through to her.
His willingness to fall on any sword she put in his path until his innocence was proved.
“I’m sorry this has happened,” the Eternal One said.
“Don’t be sorry. Explain yourself. You knew my reservations. You knew my fear. And still, you—”
Kai’s voice caught, and she spun before the woman could witness the pain contorting her face. The tears in her eyes.
No. She couldn’t feel this now. Later. Later, she and Fala could grieve together.
“You warned me against distraction,” Kai said, then turned to face her.
“I admit I ignored that advice, and it blinded me. I let him blind me to what’s going on in our own union.
He weakened our people by weakening me. And now our people suffer.
Because I let myself love him. Because in my desperate hold to protect my heart, I forgot about everyone else. ”
The Eternal One was already shaking her head. “Atsadi is not where your battle lies. I stand by that.”
“But, the prisoner—”
“Not everything is so black and white.” Her brown and blue gaze lowered, and she let out a long, slow breath. “That said, I fear this is much bigger than even I, myself, realized.”
Kai planted her feet before the woman, gripping the cool bone hilt of the blade at her side. “What do you know?”
“A great deal, actually, but nothing that will help you where Atsadi is concerned. I can only ask you to trust your instincts.”
“Atsadi—our situation—is merely a room within the mountain,” Kai said. “I have to focus on what I can’t see beyond the walls of that room. Isn’t that what you advised me from the start?”
The Eternal One smiled gently. “I did.”
“Help me see what is beyond my sight.”
The woman nodded once. “I would start by telling you what you would eventually learn anyway as Grand Matriarch. Your mother knows, as did her mother. It passes only through the blood of the First Daughter alone—no one else’s. Do you understand?”