Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was hard to say how long Draven and Rhea remained in Tynan’s meeting room after he left.
The moment those onyx double doors closed, leaving only them encased within those odious walls, Rhea had broken down and sobbed, and Draven did his best to hold her through his unspeakable pain.
Eventually, she had gone silent, staring absently at the floor.
Then, she had sobbed again. Draven did what he could.
He rubbed soothing circles on her small back.
Sat down on the floor next to her when she went mute.
Held her tediously against his chest when she sobbed again, making sure the angry, oozing mark below his shoulder remained untouched.
As he did, a terrifying numbness greeted him. It stroked his bones and caressed his muscles like a friend.
He let the numbness have its way with him, somehow making the physical pain constricting his body feel more bearable. Made the disgust taste less bitter at knowing he now held Tynan’s sigil permanently on his skin.
Draven and Rhea sat side by side with their knees drawn into their chests, the surrounding silence filled with more noise than a tavern. They hadn’t uttered a word in… how long? He truly didn’t know.
“I’m going to remove them from the wall,” Draven finally murmured, his voice foreign to his own ears.
Was that really him who just spoke right then? It sounded nothing like him.
Rhea stared at the ground, clutching at her knees. She was still trembling, her every movement punctuated by a vibrating quality. Her lips were thinned, chapped and stretched taut. She didn’t say anything.
“I’ll ask my brother to help me burn their bodies.
He has fire magic.” Draven waited, watching to see if his words had any effect.
They did not. “His name is Kiran, remember?” he tried, attempting to muster as much softness to his voice as he could.
Yet nothing came—at least not in the way it used to.
“He’ll help me take care of you. You’re going to love him; Kiran’s the best.” Draven’s eyes blurred, and he pressed his fingertips to his cheeks to find them slicked with tears.
He ignored it.
“Rhea?”
Nothing.
The silence was sticky and thick like sap.
Draven dropped his head, a sigh gliding through his pursed lip. Then, he lifted his eyes, braced his weight on his knees, and rose. He only glanced back at Rhea once before making for the western wall where Atlas’s body was pinned. His chin quivered while gazing up at him.
Draven pressed two fingers together and circled them. An obsidian wall rose between him and Rhea—she didn’t need to see this. Didn’t need to watch her father’s body be peeled from the wall like nothing more than some hunted animal.
Using his magic, Draven released Atlas and brought him gently to the ground.
He gripped the man who was the closest thing to a father Draven had ever known beneath his shoulders, and he dragged him near the table, where his mother’s body still rested.
The mark at his shoulder screamed, and it caused Draven’s vision to flicker with pain.
Yet, in that moment, Draven welcomed the torment.
He decided it was but a small price for him to pay compared to what his family just suffered.
He unbound his mother next, and he placed her gently on the floor next to Atlas.
In an action he couldn’t quite justify but felt deep in his bones was a necessity, he went back for the brass spectacles, returning them to Atlas.
Then, Draven placed his cold hand in his mother’s, intertwining their stiff fingers the best he could.
After, he went to the eastern wall to recover Suzumi.
As he worked, his mind assumed a sort of lifeless detachment. It was almost as if there was now an invisible barrier between him and the world. A sheet of protection preventing him from fully feeling and experiencing what was happening around him.
The numbness festering within him compounded.
When Draven was finished and his fallen family was laid side-by-side—covered by a wool blanket he found folded near the northward hearth in the room—he dropped the obsidian wall he had kept erected between him and Rhea. She had not moved—not even an inch.
He approached her with careful steps, feeling so detached from reality after what he just did.
“Rhea,” he murmured, bending down and extending his hand to her.
“Why don’t we go to my chambers and wash ourselves.
I’ll call on my mother’s lady-in-waiting.
She can run you a warm bath and fetch you fresh clothes. ”
She didn’t stir.
“Rhea,” he pressed as gently as he could. “We shouldn’t dwell in here any longer than we have to. It’s not good for us. Please.”
She finally pried her eyes from the ground and slid them to meet Draven.
Her eyelashes fluttered with rapid blinks, her brows puckered as if with thought.
Wordlessly, she placed her hand in Draven’s, and he helped her up from the floor.
He tucked her into his uninjured side, and together, they left that infernal room behind.
When the doors were pulled back, Draven’s brows pinched together at the sight of Finlay pacing like a mad man. He halted the moment he saw Draven, stiffening.
“Brother, I—” Yet Finlay’s words died in his throat before he finished his sentence.
From the look in his expression, Draven knew he saw the bodies laid to rest beneath the blanket.
Glimpsed the blood stains oozing down the western wall and covering that damned table.
His piercing turquoise eyes found Rhea last, so many questions passing through his gaze.
Finally, he turned his attention back to Draven.
“I am so sorry,” Finlay rasped, shaking his head while terror swam in his eyes.
Draven’s expression wrinkled, caught somewhere between thought and pain. “You have nothing to be sorry for. It’s not your fault.”
At the words, Finlay’s eyes darted away from him, and he shifted on his feet.
Draven watched, a knot growing in his stomach. “It’s not your fault…right, Finlay?”
Finlay glanced at him, a terrible, genuine look of sorrow painting a silhouette over his face.
“I’m so sorry, brother,” he started, his expression crumbling.
“I am so unbelievably sorry. I—I didn’t know your father would do this.
Was capable of this. He–he threatened to pit my own father against me.
To make him loathe me more than he already does. You know how much—”
Draven stopped listening, instead only waiting for the sound of Finlay’s rambling voice to diminish. “It was you,” he breathed, part accusation, part revelation. “You told Tynan where to find us. Where my mother and I were hiding.”
His brows dipped with regret. “I’m so sorry.”
Draven felt Rhea stiffen against his side.
She shifted, then, as if coming back into her body.
She shrugged his arm off of her, and without a sliver of warning, she approached Finlay.
Once there was nothing but an arm’s distance between them, she spat at his feet, pulled her mother’s dagger hairpin from the half-drawn bun in her hair, and she shoved the blade straight through Finlay’s thigh.
He fell instantly, clutching at his leg. “What the hell?” he shouted through gasps of pain.
“You killed my family,” Rhea hissed with quiet vehemence. “You deserve to suffer much more than just some petty flesh wound.” With a curl in her lip, she walked forward and pulled the slender dagger free from his skin. Blood squirted from the wound, and Finlay hurriedly covered it with his hands.
Kiran rounded the corner then, cheeks flushed and out of breath.
He probably heard Finlay’s scream and rushed to his aid—until he realized it was Rhea who injured him.
As Draven watched him take in the scene, he wondered if he had been watching his father’s atrocities from the upper balconies like they had watched his father’s meetings in the past. From the paleness of his skin, the disheveled state of his hair, and the red, mottled stains circling his glassy eyes, Draven would wager he had been.
And in some twisted way, it almost eased a small something from Draven’s chest. To know he and Rhea were not the sole witnesses to the tragedy that had just taken place.
Kiran’s eyes were cold as he observed Finlay, seeming to already understand the situation.
Without offering him a passing word, he knelt down beside Finlay and smacked his hands from the wound.
Then, using only a single finger, he cauterized the bleeding.
Finlay grit his teeth against the pain, but he no longer shouted—no longer vocalized his discomfort.
Once Kiran was finished, he pressed his hand to his thigh and lifted himself from the ground. He bounced his gaze from Draven to Rhea back to Draven. All the cold in his eyes melted, leaving nothing but a woeful warmth.
It was like feeling the sun in the throes of an ice storm.
Kiran’s expression held the weight of a thousand words, but as he flicked his eyes back to Rhea in silent question, Draven knew what he was prioritizing, and he was grateful for it. He dipped his chin once, giving Kiran the confirmation he was looking for.
It was all he needed.
He stepped forward, bending slightly at the waist. Kiran was the oldest between him and Finlay, which also made him the tallest of them at the moment.
Rhea looked so tiny next to him, her ten-year-old frame so petite and delicate against Kiran’s broadness.
“You must be Rhea?” he asked, his voice carrying the lightness everyone needed right then.
She bit her lip and nodded, a tentative bitterness encasing the gesture.
Kiran hummed, nodding at her while offering a tiny, respectful smile. “Draven has told me a lot about you,” he murmured.
She glanced back at him, then back to Kiran with reluctance. “He has?”
“Oh, yes,” he assured her. “Quite the babbling buffoon when it comes to you, actually.”
Though it was so tiny it was nearly imperceptible, the corner of her mouth curved upward just a fraction. And Draven had never loved Kiran as much as he did in that moment.
“I’m Kiran, Draven’s brother,” he continued, still bent at the waist so he could speak with Rhea at eye level. “If you’d like, I could walk you to his chamber and tell you all the embarrassingly wonderful things he’s said while we wait for a lady-in-waiting to arrive and run you a bath.”
Rhea’s hands wrung together as she considered his offer in silence. Finally, she said, “Draven talked a lot about you, too.”
Kiran’s smile widened, though not to the point of inconsideration. “Has he?”
She nodded.
“Well then, it would appear Draven talks an awful lot more than I ever realized.”
Rhea looked as though she wanted to laugh at that, but the claws of sadness were sunk far too deep within her to even attempt such a gesture.
Laughing was for happy people. Laughing was for those who could afford it.
He knew Rhea’s coffers were plundered, just like his.
Kiran, clearly giving his best to walk the tight rope he was treading, pressed gently, “Shall we be on our way?”
She didn’t answer right away, instead turning her chin over her shoulder to glance back at Draven. He nodded at her, attempting to offer her as much assurance as he could just through the mere expression in his eyes. It seemed to be enough.
“Alright,” she finally said softly, taking Kiran’s now outstretched hand.
As they turned to walk in the opposite direction, Kiran escorting her down the corridor, Draven caught the final sounds of his tender voice telling Rhea, “I like your dagger. I especially liked what you did with it.”
He just barely heard Rhea’s dim reply. “Thanks. Draven taught me.”
Once he could hear them no more, Draven turned his attention onto Finlay, who stared with dead eyes at the wall opposite them.
His injured leg was flat on the ground while his other was tucked into him.
As Draven observed him, he wondered if there was ever a version of reality where they came back from this.
Where he found it in his heart to forgive him for what he did.
He doubted it.
All Draven felt when looking at his brother was rage. Pure, unadulterated rage.
Feeling overcome by his anger, he jerked his chin away from Finlay, curling and uncurling his fists at his side. Then, without so much as asking for an explanation for why he did what he did, Draven strode away.
Finlay called out to him, a quiet desperation lining his words. “Where are you going?”
Draven halted, only sparing him a passing glance as he briefly turned his chin over his shoulder. “To become the monster Tynan wants me to be.”