Chapter 47 #5
Tomorrow. Vareena. The lower market. Thirty coppers. Next Solstice. Everything people thought they had time to say tomorrow. My breath left me.
“Kieran loved you,” Kaelros said. “And he lied anyway.”
The Codex brushed my mind, faint and desperate.
Starborn.
My eyes burned.
Codex.
He twists—
The cuffs flared. Pain exploded through my skull. Kaelros moved immediately, Shadow closing around my head.
“There you are.”
He pushed deeper. The Codex recoiled.
DO NOT LET HIM FIND THE—
The connection tore. I screamed.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know!”
“What binds it to you?”
“I DON’T KNOW!”
“What has it shown you?”
“Nothing!”
Kaelros drove deeper. Pages flashed behind my eyes—stars, threads, a Loom stretching through darkness. Then a woman whose face I knew only from fragments. Nirael. The image vanished before he could hold it.
Kaelros froze. “What was that?”
Blood ran over my teeth when I smiled. “Go fuck yourself.”
His control finally cracked. The chain above my left wrist jerked upward. My toes left the floor, and both shoulders took my full weight. My right shoulder tore beneath the strain. The scream that came out of me was ragged and animal.
Kaelros watched until it ended. “Again.”
Shadow invaded my mind. I fought with whatever I had left, not with courage or skill but with anything I could throw between him and the truth.
Auntie Nara’s kitchen table. Mud after rain in Edenlo.
Maia laughing. Irelia calling my name. Vareena standing barefoot on her bed with pins between her lips.
Dax stealing bread. Lidia cursing over wine. Kieran calling me Menace. Wrong.
Kaelros seized it. The ruined southern ring swallowed me. Kieran stood behind me, his hand around my wrist.
Again.
Shadow answering Shadow. Kaelros laughed somewhere inside my skull.
He made you exactly what I asked him to.
“No!”
I slammed forward against nothing. The memory shattered. My feet dropped back to the floor, and I nearly collapsed. Kaelros stepped away.
“How disappointing.”
I spat blood onto the stone. “Your son hates you.”
Silence. I looked up and saw it. A fracture, however small. I pushed.
“He hates you so much he chose the girl you sent him to betray.”
Kaelros’s face went still. I smiled through the blood.
“You lost him to Aurenya and Maerox’s daughter.”
Shadow struck my face hard enough to snap my head sideways.
For the first time, Kaelros had reacted before choosing to.
Only for a second. When I looked back, the monster had rebuilt himself.
But I had seen underneath. Kieran mattered to him.
Not as a son. As property. Neseryn too. Me too.
Everything Kaelros called love became ownership eventually.
“You think love will save him?” Kaelros asked.
“I think you’re terrified it already did.”
He came close enough that I could smell smoke and metal on his clothes. “Kieran does not know how to love without ruining what he touches.”
“Wonder where he learned that.”
His hand closed around my throat. Not Shadow. His hand. He squeezed the breath out of me.
“He may have developed feelings for you. That does not erase what he did before them.”
My vision darkened at the edges.
“He lied.”
Pressure increased.
“He watched.”
My lungs burned.
“He obeyed.”
Black spots spread across my sight.
“And when he finally decided he wanted you more than he wanted my approval, he did what frightened men have always done.”
Kaelros leaned close.
“He waited until it was too late.”
He released me. Air tore into my lungs, and I coughed until blood spotted the floor beneath me.
“How long?”
Kaelros paused.
“How long have I been here?”
“Long enough.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No. It’s not.”
My eyes moved toward the hidden door. Kieran was coming. Eiryx. Dax. Lidia. Emrin. Damon. Someone. Kaelros followed my gaze.
“No one knows where you are.”
“Kieran does.”
“Does he?”
“He knows Umbrael.”
“He knows the kingdom. Not this room.”
“He’ll find it.”
“Then why are you still here?”
He asked it gently. I understood what he was doing.
Understanding did not stop it from working.
How long had I been unconscious? Hours? A day?
More? The Sanctum had been collapsing when I was taken.
Kieran could be injured. Halos could have detained him after what everyone saw.
Or Kieran had stayed. Or chosen them. Or himself.
His face when our fingers slipped apart had been real. Hadn’t it?
Kaelros turned toward the wall. “Rest, child.”
I laughed weakly. “How generous.”
“You’ll need it. Tomorrow we begin again.”
My stomach turned. “Tomorrow?”
Kaelros looked back at me. “You thought this was it?”
Cold settled into my bones. His smile was almost pleasant.
“This was the introduction.”
The wall opened.
“Kaelros.”
He paused.
“You’re going to die.”
“Everyone does.”
“No.” My voice shook, but the rage did not. “I’m going to kill you.”
A trace of approval crossed his face. Then he left. The wall sealed behind him and darkness swallowed me whole.
For a long time, I hung there. I counted breaths until the numbers stopped making sense.
My legs shook until I could no longer keep my heels lifted, and every time they failed, my weight dropped into my shoulders.
Eventually I stopped wasting screams on it.
My body had begun to understand that no one came because I hurt.
Then I thought about Vareena. Her ribbon was in Kaelros’s pocket.
I pictured tomorrow in the lower market.
Vareena complaining about prices while buying another useless trinket.
Lidia insulting both of us. Dax refusing to pay thirty coppers until Vareena threatened to involve Emrin.
Raiden trying not to look too pleased when Vareena took his hand.
Next Solstice. Vareena had imagined me alive a year from now before I had imagined it for myself. And she was gone.
The grief came with the others. Maia. Irelia.
Auntie Nara. Vareena. People from Edenlo whose names I had known my entire life, and others whose faces I remembered better than their names.
They crowded behind my eyes until death stopped feeling like separate moments and became one long thing I had been carrying since Edenlo.
Fire. Blood. Empty places where people should have been.
Every time I survived, someone else seemed to join them.
Everyone kept treating survival like proof of strength.
It didn’t feel like strength. It felt like being the one left behind.
A sound tore out of me, too tired to become a scream.
“I’m so tired.”
The chamber gave the words back. I wanted Auntie Nara’s kitchen.
Maia. Irelia. Vareena complaining about my hair.
I wanted one person I loved to remain alive long enough for me to stop wondering when I would lose them.
My hands curled against the cuffs. Kaelros had done enough of this.
Enough death had reached me through men who wanted power and called everyone else collateral.
Grief twisted until heat took its place.
Rage. Ugly enough that I welcomed it, because rage didn’t ask me to mourn anyone. It only gave me someone to blame.