Chapter 17 #2
Emmeline shifted, their thighs pressing together. She inhaled at the contact, but she pulled back, needing to force distance between them.
“I’m going to get you out of this,” Emmeline swore as Roremar dropped a hand to her leg.
He dragged his thumb over her knee, skin heating even through her leathers. “How?”
“I—I don’t know yet.” Emmeline’s voice was raspy, distracted by his touch. “But I am. I swear it.”
He saved her back on Lyra. Now she would do the same.
“Huntress…”
There was such a defeated look in his eye that without thinking, Emmeline blurted, “I’m living at the Chancellor’s manor. I’m going to get closer to his advisors and prove your innocence.”
Roremar’s eyes narrowed. He asked his next question like he’d already deduced the answer. “Aren’t you here for Valyn Temple Academy?”
Emmeline bit her lip, and Roremar’s gaze flashed down to it. The air between them charged.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked without breaking that addictive stare from her mouth.
Emmeline was weak to the sensation of his eyes on her, but she chose her words carefully, one truth at a time. “After everything came out on Lyra, the Chancellor wanted me in a different role than an instructor.”
Roremar traced patterns over her knee again. “Are you getting the chance to look for your sister like you wanted?”
Of course, that was what he asked. Always worried about her, even when his life was at risk. The only person who had ever protected her like this. An ache spread behind her sternum.
“I’m working on it,” Emmeline admitted over the emotion choking her. “I’m moving slowly so no one realizes who I’m searching for. I don’t want to endanger her.”
“Why would it endanger her?”
“There are more eyes on me than I expected.”
Coveted.
Desired.
Kept.
Roremar brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and the slight contact as his thumb grazed her jaw made her breath hitch.
Belong.
“I’m happy you’re where you’ve always strived to be, Huntress.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry I won’t get to see you find her.”
The resignation in his words was like dunking her body in ice water.
Emmeline’s voice wavered as she pleaded, “You’re going to be there—you’re going to see it.”
“They want me dead,” he stated. “And maybe the Spirit Realm is the best place for me after what I’ve done.”
“No!” Emmeline clung to him, his confession breaking something within her. The pieces shattered like stars streaming from the sky. “You know as well as I do that it wasn’t you. You wouldn’t kill anyone—you wouldn’t harm your brother.”
“But I did!” Roremar growled, the intensity of those words burning, the smoke they caused enough to smother them both.
Shoving up, Roremar paced the room. His hand dug though his hair, and Emmeline watched the memory slam into him again and again. He broke apart more with each impact.
“I was the vessel he used. Who’s to say he won’t do it again? Fates, Emmeline…I killed all those people—I killed my father, I killed Nico—and I can’t even remember it. It’s driving me mad to not know.”
The part of Emmeline that was tethered to him screamed as she understood. She’d worried how Roremar had been coping, but he wasn’t.
He was drowning.
What he’d been forced to do would traumatize anyone, but it didn’t only scar him. It unstitched old wounds from his father that had never been properly treated. It ripped them open and flooded them with blame, guilt, and shame.
Snapping out of Dryvius’s control to find his father dead ten years ago had heightened Roremar’s natural curiosity and inner analyst, his obsession with fixing fractured things. It had shaped him. Now, his being was compounding around that demand.
And it was pushing him to the brink.
“Dryvius manipulated you to kill them. That’s true.” Emmeline rose, meeting Roremar in the center of the room. She tried to absorb his anger, his frustration. Give his grief the space it required. “But that doesn’t mean you deserve to die, too.”
She took his hands, voice gentle. “You were forced to do something horrible. I’m not belittling that.
But you are not the one who should suffer the consequences.
There are consequences you won’t be able to escape—there are so many things to work through, including figuring out how to stop him from doing it again.
But this? Asking to die isn’t the way to heal. ”
Roremar pulled his hands from hers, continuing to pace as if remaining idle only made the pain worse.
“I don’t know how I can heal,” he admitted.
“When I saw you today, I felt alive, but maybe it’s only a moment.
Maybe one moment is all I get.” Roremar’s voice was choked, like it was the first time he’d said these words aloud but they’d been ingrained into his spirit.
“How can you say otherwise? If I’m tied to Dryvius—if I’m the only weapon he has—why shouldn’t I let myself die in this tournament? ”
Roremar looked at her like he was begging—begging for an answer, a reason to keep going when he was drowning.
So, inhaling and holding his stare, Emmeline gave him the only one she could. “Because whoever wins the tournament gets me.”