Chapter 64 Kiera
Kiera
I was sitting on the throne when Renwell stormed back into the room.
He glared up at me. “Get. Down.”
I tapped Mother’s knife on a shimmering arm of the royal seat. “No.”
“Do not make me remove you,” he snarled, slowly climbing the dais.
“I won’t run from you, Renwell,” I said, my muscles tensing. “I won’t hide either. I mean to kill you.”
Renwell halted, surprise darting across his face. Quickly replaced by rage. “Why? Because your lover is on his way? He will die before he reaches this palace.”
“He has an army,” I snapped, fear biting into my words.
“So do I. An army of Wolves awaits him before the bridge.” Renwell eased up the last few steps. “You may have destroyed my mine and half my army, but you will not win this battle. Surrender to me now, before it’s too late.”
I laughed. “I was never going to swear an oath to you, Renwell.”
“Pity,” he said softly, his lips bloodless. “We could’ve done such great things together.”
He lunged just as I lashed out with my boot. I kicked him in the throat. His neck folded around my boot heel, then he flew backward down the dais. The crown fell from his head with a sharp clang and rolled away.
Savage satisfaction filled me. This was why revenge was so easy to seek. Attaining it felt too good.
“Now you know what it’s like to be under someone’s boot,” I seethed, stalking down the steps toward him as he staggered to his feet, clutching his neck. “Did you really think I would forgive you again after you humiliated me? Scarred me?” I gestured at my cheek.
He ripped his sunstone sword out of its sheath. “You did the same to me. A scar for a scar. A lie for a lie.”
I circled him with my small knife. He was just as fast as me and stronger.
Surprise him. Keep him off-balance, Nikella’s voice urged me in my head.
“I think in your own dark, twisted way, you do care for me,” I taunted him. “You were so eager to get me back here, not because you needed me, but because you missed me. You crave my attention, the control you had over me. I looked up to you. Respected you. And you loved me for it.”
Renwell’s sword shook in his fist. “I do not love you, stupid girl. I have never loved you. This is the same, desperate search for a weakness. I do not have one.”
“Oh, but you do,” I said, circling closer.
“You’ve let me live countless times when it would’ve been easier to get rid of me.
You’ve lured me back to your side, knowing full well I intend to destroy you.
You tried to get me to care for you in return—pretending to save my life, offering me the power I always wanted, treating me with basic kindnesses.
It was all a ploy to make me care for you because you see feelings as a weakness.
And you needed me to be weaker than you. ”
“You are weaker than me,” Renwell snarled. But he still didn’t attack.
I pushed a little closer. “Nikella was wrong—you care for me. You always have.”
“Nikella wanted to believe I loved her as well,” Renwell spat, looking slightly deranged. “And where is she now, Kiera?”
“You sent Korvin after her because you were afraid of her, of what she could do to you.”
“I’m certainly not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” I whispered. “You took control over me at my weakest. I will defeat you at your strongest.”
“You will die as she did. As your mother did. As Aiden will. Weakened by love.” He leaped at me.
I slid to my knees and sliced at his leg. He roared and kicked me in the ribs. I skittered away, springing to my feet. He was on me in a moment, swinging his sword with deadly efficiency. I blocked and evaded and retreated under his fury.
Until he stumbled on his bleeding leg. I darted in and slashed at his ribs. He grabbed my knife hand, kicked out my legs, and slammed me to the floor.
I cried out and tried to throw off his heavy weight, but I was pinned. Panic rose from the depths of my mind, fogging over my senses as I thrashed. Gods, I couldn’t die like this. I refused.
“Shut up,” Renwell growled. He snatched Mother’s knife from my hand and slid it into his boot. “Even if you did manage to kill me, your lover would never make it across the bridge. I made sure of it. Or rather, Librius did.”
Librius? He was still alive? How could Librius—
Suddenly, it all made sense. The bridge. The guards. The secrecy. The time Renwell spent in the dungeon. Why he was so sure Aiden wouldn’t reach him here.
Renwell’s snarl melted into a smile at my growing horror.
“You rigged the bridge to explode?” I choked out.
“Fitting, isn’t it, that I learned of Librius’s special skills because of Aiden and my sister. The same people who destroyed my most valuable resource with their irritating explosives. Now, they will both have died from them.”
Tears slid down my temples. “Please. Please tell the guards not to set them off.”
Something dark and malicious glowed in Renwell’s eyes. “Are you begging me, Kiera?”
I swallowed my pride. “Yes.”
“See, this is what love does,” Renwell murmured. “It has you begging beneath a man you claim to hate.”
My hatred for him was deeper than ever. But my love for Aiden knew no depths, no bounds, no rules.
“If I kneel before you and swear my loyalty, will you call off the guards?”
Renwell hesitated, then slowly nodded. “Yes.”
You lie. But so do I.
Renwell rose to his feet, blood coating his pant leg and his side. But he held himself upright and proud. He’d never needed a crown to rule over those he saw as lesser than him.
I slowly gathered my body, kneeling at the tips of his boots. I gazed up at his victorious smile.
“Before I swear myself to you, you should know,” I said, inching my hands upward, “that the only reason I would get on my knees before you would be to”—I snatched Mother’s knife from his boot and rammed it into his gut—“steal a knife from your boot.”
I ripped the blade out, and Renwell staggered backward, clutching his stomach. I raced out of the throne room, my heart screaming in my chest.
Am I too late?
I sprinted down the steps, suddenly seeing what Renwell had prevented me from noticing before—fuses trailing over the sides of the bridge. Guards with torches stood in the middle of the bridge, waiting.
Shouts and clashing weapons reached me from the far side of the bridge, where a battle raged in a crimson tangle of steel and sunstone. A familiar black-haired man fought his way through the Wolves like a demon.
Trying to reach the bridge. To find me.
I screamed as I ran across the bridge, waving my arms to get his attention. “Aiden! Don’t cross the bridge! Aiden! It’s a trap!” But the roaring waterfall swallowed my voice.
The guards shifted uneasily as I charged toward them.
“STOP HER!” Renwell bellowed from behind me.
One guard stepped in my way. I cleaved through his arm, snagging the torch before it landed on a fuse. I kept running. I waved the torch, trying to catch Aiden’s attention.
He finally looked up, his face breaking into a relieved smile at the sight of me. Which morphed into a look of fury a moment before someone slammed into me from behind.
I fell hard on the stone, trying to keep the torch and my knife from hitting as well.
Renwell’s heavy breathing had a rattle to it as he seized my legs and started dragging me off the bridge. “Blow it as soon as that man steps on it,” he ordered the nearest guard.
“No!” I screamed, kicking my legs until I crushed Renwell’s hand against the stone.
He swore and let me go. I scrambled to my feet. Aiden was so close to the bridge, fighting as hard as he could to reach me.
My heart pounded, heavy and sad and lost. “I love you, Aiden.”
I lunged past the guard and pressed my torch to the fuse in the middle of the bridge. It spat and sizzled out of sight.
I met Aiden’s eyes one last time before an explosion ripped through the air. The ground buckled beneath my feet.
Something snagged my collar and hauled me backward. The bridge between me and Aiden crumbled away into the ravenous waterfall, carrying the screaming guards with it.
I twisted around to see Renwell on his knees behind me. The part of the bridge leading back to the palace was gone, too. We were stranded in the middle of the waterfall on a wide, precarious pillar that shuddered harder with every passing moment.
“Even now,” he rasped. “Even now, at the end, I can’t let you go.”
His face was stark white. Crimson blood dribbled from his lips to his beard. But something had fallen away in his dark eyes, like the bridge that had collapsed into the sea.
A vulnerability he’d never allowed to show until his life and his soul were already forfeit.
My heart beat hard and slow, suspended in my chest like a bell ringing its final hour. Yet I couldn’t look away from the dying man who’d saved me yet again.
“I hate you,” he whispered, the words crystal clear over the deadly waterfall.
“I hate that I failed because of you. That my plan was perfect until you burrowed under my skin and drove me mad.” His eyes crawled over my face, latching onto the scar across my cheek.
“Gods damn my weakness for you. I have failed because . . .” His lips contorted into a bitter, bloody smile.
“Because I care for you. You have won our game, at last. Only too late, as we shall both die for our weaknesses.”
I stared down at the man who had twisted my mind until I wasn’t sure if I could trust it. The man who said I was better than my father, but who’d been worse himself. I felt the smallest drop of pity in a waterfall of resolution.
“You didn’t fail because you care for me,” I said. “You failed because you didn’t care enough.”
The pillar wobbled as stone crunched and split.
“KIERA!”
I looked back at Aiden, who held onto one of the bridge posts and stretched out his hand to me over the abyss.
“It’s going to fall this way!” he shouted. “When it does, jump!”
Jump? I waited for the needles of fear to set in, but they didn’t. I felt strangely calm.
A wet cough brought my attention back to Renwell. His eyes dulled with the certainty of death. “You will fall.”
I will never let you fall.
“No,” I said. “My wings are too strong for your weak cages. Your knives will never be sharp enough to carve away my freedom. I will rise. I will fly. Over this abyss and any other. It is you who will fall.”
I glanced at Mother’s knife, then tossed it into the waterfall. Let Mynastra have her stars back. I didn’t need them anymore.
I had a better weapon now.
The bridge cracked and crumbled, pitching forward.
Aiden shouted and stretched his hand out further, his face taut with desperation, his fingers curling toward me, grasping.
I charged over the falling stone.
Faster. Faster.
My heart pumped harder.
Free. Free.
Fly!
My feet didn’t hesitate. I threw myself off the edge. Toward Aiden.