CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
I’d lost count of how many times I’d hovered outside these doors over the years, just…steeling my nerves before Bellan gave me the names of my next targets. Of the next traitors, I reminded myself. I took a deep breath and sauntered through the doors.
He glanced up at my arrival. “Lydia,” he said without preamble, “we have him.”
I hover at the edge of Council Square, my breathing shallow through the stench of death that clogs the air. Screaming—constant, unending screaming—claws at my fraying sanity. My feet refuse to move. To go find out if he’s dead.
Supplies had been raided from Vircann’s infirmary and storehouses.
A sea of tents congests the square, a courtesy to the injured.
Nothing can blot out their horrible cries, but at least their suffering isn’t on full display.
More and more of those screams fall quiet the longer I watch.
It is impossible not to wonder if it’s because people are being healed, or dying.
Alexei is hunched over a bowl of soup outside one of the tents. His expression is vacant; unreadable. He idly stirs the soup but doesn’t eat it. Nothing to hint at what horror may lie behind him. I stare at it, that tent, my chest so tight I can barely breathe.
A featherlight touch brushes my elbow and I jump. Charlise stands beside me, her features drawn and warm complexion ashen. My heart leaps into my throat, my eyes already wet in anticipation of her words: He’s dead. You killed him, too.
“He’s alive,” she says gently.
My knees buckle and I sob into my hands, quick, violent things that can’t punch out of my chest fast enough.
She kneels besides me. “He lost about as much blood as someone can lose and live to brag about it. His ankle was broken. His abdomen looked more like pasta than flesh. Seventeen puncture wounds, three broken fingers, a few broken ribs…” She shakes her head.
“I’m not certain how he’s alive, to be honest.”
Alive. He’s alive. I repeat those two simple but wondrous words again and again in my mind. I push off the ground, my eyes glued to that tent.
“Lydia,” Charlise says. Her fingers stop just short of grasping my wrist. “He was conscious, briefly. He said…” She withdraws her hand and picks at the blood beneath her nails. “He said he didn’t want to see you.”
My stomach joins the blood-crusted stones at my boots.
Her brows scrunch, questions raging in her honey-brown eyes. Eyes that narrow on my sliced open palm, then home in on my bloody shoulder. “I don’t have much magic left, but I can wrap those for you, at least,” she offers.
I glance down at my palm. The barest hint of a scab already mars the angry red.
I pluck the lone dagger that hangs from Charlise’s waist and jerk the blade across the wound.
She hisses and lurches for me, like she’s concerned I’ll stick it through my heart next.
Her eyes burn with words she is too polite to say.
“Thank you for saving him,” I say, my voice hollow to my own ears. I incline my palm. “And the reminder.” I hand her the knife and hobble my way to the tent.
Alexei’s dead eyes only rise when my boots fill his field of view. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he says, his tone as flat as mine. “And neither do I. Not yet.”
“I have to see that he’s okay,” I whisper. I look anywhere but at him.
“Okay?” Alexei hisses. “Okay?” He dumps the soup he stands up so fast. “Nothing about this is okay. Laney is dead. Do you realize that? And Griffon nearly joined her. The legion is in shambles. Vircann’s guard is decimated.
No matter what the outcome of tonight was, we lost. So no. Nothing is okay.”
I swallow hard, a thousand words clogging my throat. “I’m so sorry.” They are the only ones that can make it out. And I already know they will never be enough. “I have to see him.”
Alexei grunts and flings a hand toward the tent. “Don’t blame me for what he says.” He flops back down and angles his shoulders away from me. Dismissal.
I mentally fell another pillar of the new family I’ve extinguished as thoroughly as my first.
I wobble on my feet. I try to take a deep breath, but only a shallow gasp trickles past the fist clamped around my chest. My hand shakes as I reach for the flap of the tent and slip inside.
He is sitting up, his only clothes a pair of undergarments. He tracks me as I take two tentative steps toward him, my hands fluttering over my mouth. That cluster of words dies in my throat as I stare and stare and stare at him. With the blood washed away…
A violent spasm wracks my body. I can’t even count them, the wounds that adorn him like filigree on some barbaric sculpture. Words fail me as miserably as they ever have.
His eyes are a cold, brutal brown that is hard as stone. “I respected your wishes when you asked me to leave after Lakuro.” The unsaid words are clear—but you refuse to do the same.
Speech is a foreign thing. I can’t peel my eyes off the round hole above his heart. It had come so close…
His body tenses and immediately shudders at the tugging of a hundred wounds. My gaze darts up to his—to four brutal slashes that trail out of his hairline and across the hard plane of his cheek. It pins me, that brutally cold stare, like a bug with its wing beneath a boot.
“When we were up there you said I had a choice.” His soft words are barely audible through the din. “And I chose you. I begged you to choose me too.” He throws his arms out, baring his battered body. “You didn’t choose me.”
The pain drenching those four words strikes deeper than any arrow. Somewhere through the noise in my head, I remember…his words. His plea. But I hadn’t listened. Tears slip down my cheeks.
His eyes flash at my silence. “You’ve got nothing to say?”
I fold my arms over my chest, like that will somehow keep it together.
He scoffs. “That’s fine. I’ve got plenty.
” He struggles to push himself off the cot, his face twisting with pain.
I know better than to try and help. “If you had just listened when we said it was a setup, instead of chomping their bait like a starved lunatic, their entire plan would have fallen apart. That net would have been worthless and when Indra’s strength ran out, you would have had the entire fucking legion to escort you as you sunk those ships into the Hasting!
” His voice rises with every word. “You trapped them under that net. You left them at the mercy of three thousand da’kai.
You are the reason their plan damn near succeeded, and you are the reason Laney is a fucking corpse! ”
Every truth strikes like a physical blow. Rapid breaths burn my nose. My gaze jumps to his hands, white-knuckled on the edge of the cot, before returning to eyes that simmer with rage.
“Still nothing to say for yourself? What if I mention Jamie Tablor? Or the countless people you killed before her? How about that girl, in the tavern on your birthday? The one you left in shreds because of just one more terrible, misguided decision among a thousand shitty, selfish decisions?”
I flinch, my ears ringing with every shouted word. His hand rises to a brutal slash across his ribs, and he groans before sagging against the cot.
“That’s a bit rich,” I choke out, “coming from the person who destroyed Cyprian on a whim.” I sway and stagger a step. He doesn’t so much as twitch toward me.
The coldness in his gaze sweeps through my chest like a blizzard.
He’s never looked at me like that. Not even at Dray’s.
“But there’s a difference, Lydia. I’ve faced what I did.
I wake up every morning and embrace the guilt.
I suffer the consequences every second of every minute of every oath-cursed day!
And I’ve accepted what Cyprian says about who I am.
But not you. Right? You hide from everything you’ve done. ”
Understanding and a cruel smile draws over his face. I shrink back a step, fear sinking her talons deep into my gut.
“That’s what Lakuro shows you, isn’t it? You, as a vile savage?”
I grow dizzy. My lungs can’t get enough air, and what does saw down my throat is as good as a drop in a bucket.
Griffon pushes off the cot and limps to me. “Allow me to set your doubts aside. You are exactly the monster you fear,” he breathes in my ear.
He moves to shoulder past me, but blistering rage sears my veins. It is the only armor I have left, this rage.
I shove him and he yields a step, pain twisting his lips. “Don’t you dare blame all of this on me,” I snarl. “I told you to leave. Both of you. It isn’t my fault you stayed!” It is the singular defense I can find amid his slew of accusations.
His face twists with a wrath that eclipses my own.
“She stayed because you were her friend!” he roars.
“And I followed you because I thought you were my future! Some stupid, pathetic piece of me actually believed we’d find a way.
And you discarded us like trash!” He stares at me as his chest heaves.
As he slowly deflates, his shoulders sagging and quivering with pain.
He hobbles toward the tent flap but stops, once, and glances back at me.
“I’m glad my mother isn’t here to see just how wrong she was about love. All it does is fucking break you.”
He turns and limps away from me and, deep down, in the trenches of my soul, I know he is never coming back.
I stagger to his cot and curl up on it, clinging to the barest hint of cinnamon that still lingers.
I count the drops of blood splattered across its surface.
Then the cracks in the cobblestones. I move on to rows of thread on the tent wall.
Then the ceiling. I’m five hundred and thirty-two of my blood-crusted hairs deep when a hand prods my shoulder.
The first thing I see is a flash of white-blond. For one stupid, fleeting second, I expect to see Laney staring down at me. But it is her twin—her twin, because she is dead.
He sits on the edge of the cot, his eyes soft as he watches me. How much of Griffon’s eviscerating had he heard? “The Archon has ordered any who can fly back to Falcos in an hour. You should shift, so you can heal.”
I roll over and put my back to him. “No,” I say, my throat tight. “Because then I’ll feel it.” Five hundred thirty-three. Five hundred thirty-four. Five hundred thirty-five. “All of it.”