Chapter 22 Isha
ISHA
IT’S BURNED into my memory: her expression twisting with contempt. Her running from me in fear, as the hand that I gifted her chokes her at my urging. Her eyes dimming as I pour the poison inside of me into her mouth, my lips to hers.
It was my last real taste of her.
I try to avoid her afterward, since she doesn’t understand the anger, the hurt—and the regret, as much as I resist it—that fills me every time I look at her.
The pain is a consuming thing. It’s as if I were drowning in my own rivers: Hatred, Regret, Misery.
I only wish I could drink of Forgetfulness so I didn’t have to remember what being with her felt like.
Or what I’ve done. But my waters don’t affect me.
She remembers, but only the best parts. She’s forgotten how she wounded me—and what I did to her in return. So she tracks me down in my own fortress with the determined precision of a hound on my scent. Asking me what troubles me, asking what she can do for me, offering me her body.
But I can’t tell her the truth. She can’t do anything for me. And I don’t want to lay a finger on her.
When Sadaré finds me playing the harp in the salon, she finally dances for me. Not that I invited her to do so. She moves as sensually and fluidly as I thought she might, beckoning to me with her undulating hands, her chains winking and tinkling with the rolling of her hips and shoulders.
I don’t go to her. In fact, the motion of her body repulses me, somehow.
It’s not that she isn’t beautiful, because she’s as beautiful as ever, especially with warm concern and unadulterated desire welling in her bottomless eyes.
But her eyes are missing something—someone. Because it’s not really her.
The real Sadaré is not truly willing in this endeavor. She agreed to forget Daesra before, even if she only did so to save him or to entice me into eventually freeing her. She hasn’t agreed to anything now. I forced her agreement down her throat.
She was right, back when she first met me, just as she’s been right about so many things: I only wanted her to give herself to me willingly.
Now she might as well be a puppet on strings. It doesn’t help that they’re my strings. No matter how unsatisfactory and untenable I found the situation then, this is worse.
My hands stop on the actual strings of the harp before me, the notes coming to a ringing halt. Stopping her.
“Sa—sorry, Arinae,” I cover quickly. I almost called her Sadaré, but that’s not her name anymore, even though she’d almost convinced me it was—a name I still call her in the darkness of my thoughts. “I’m not in the mood.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she murmurs, looking almost as though she might weep.
I turn from the sight of her, but she nonetheless continues, “I wish that I could do something, anything, to brighten the gloom surrounding you. To ease the invisible burden weighing on your shoulders, or even understand what it is.” Her own shoulders slump out of the corner of my eye.
“You should keep playing. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. ”
“No,” I say flatly. I can’t even find solace in music anymore.
And then I understand: She’s ruined me as much as I’ve ruined her. I’ve fallen in love with her, only I didn’t realize it until I’d already lost her. And now I’m left with the bitter, festering knowledge that it will never be the same as it once was.
I know, even if she doesn’t: There’s no going back, and no solace to follow this.
What I’ve done to her is more final than killing her, because even if I were to reverse what I did, the damage would still be done.
She would still be lost to me. She would remember what I did, and she would never forgive me.
She told me as much herself, when she was trying to stay my hand. Only I didn’t listen.
Now, she’s on her knees next to me, begging me to forgive her for something she doesn’t comprehend, her hands clutching my thigh through my robe. “I want you to punish me for being unable to satisfy you,” she says fervently. “I want you to break me, and make yourself whole.”
You’re already broken. But I don’t speak the words aloud. Instead, I say, “Deonyus is nearly here.”
She huffs a sigh of frustration, sitting back on her heels and folding her arms. “I don’t want to see him. You know that.”
“But you very well may have to. So think carefully about what you might want to say to him. It could be the last time you see him. Or…” I trail off, leaving her room to fill in the empty space.
Her brow only furrows. “Or what?”
Or he stays. Distracts me from you. Or he replaces you so I don’t have to lay eyes on you ever again. Of course, I don’t say that to her, either. Even now, I can’t stand breaking her heart, even if it’s not hers anymore.
Arinae’s, not Sadaré’s.
Too late have I realized I never actually wanted Arinae.
I’m not even sure if I want Deonyus anymore.
Maybe I only wanted Daesra, and yet he was only Daesra because of Sadaré, and she was only Sadaré because of him.
Still, I want to blame him for all of this.
Almost as if he took Sadaré from me, when it was the other way around.
Either way, she’s gone. There’s only the shell of her, kneeling at my side. Neither of us will have her in the end. And now that I’ve destroyed her, destroying Daesra might be all I have left—or at least the chance to take everything from him.
WHEN I MEET HIM ON the bridge—his offensively defiant eyes, his offensively beautiful body, his offensively captivating essence, all wild with desperate determination—I’m unable to show him anything recent, of course. Because my own thoughts would betray me.
He can’t know my misery. He can’t know what I’ve done.
Still, at the wind-tousled sight of him—so infuriating, so fascinating, so unbreakable—I briefly consider giving him a glimpse of the two of us upon the throne, when she was still Sadaré and I was filled with such powerful bliss even as I was filling her.
But no. As much as it would hurt him, I want to keep that memory for myself—the last vestige of a love that was almost real.
He’ll see for himself soon enough, see her soon enough, and come to his own natural conclusions. There’s a chance he’ll break yet.
So, instead of giving him a memory, I give him a parting kiss on the cheek.
And then I take the bridge out from under him.