Chapter Twenty-One
Solana reluctantly agreed to a meeting in the library, where Cora was the one pacing the floor.
Nikolas sat in a high-backed chair with a leg slung over the arm and yawned several times in a row.
Oskar, calm and patient, perched on the other arm, and Suri, abrasive as ever, leaned against a table with her arms crossed over her chest. Reyes stood in front of the door, blocking Solana’s only exit as if to say she wouldn’t need it.
“An explanation would be nice,” Suri said. “I left my bed way too early for this.”
“There’s something important we need to discuss. As a team,” Reyes said.
He glanced at Solana, and she sighed loudly. Might as well get it over with as fast as possible. “My father is Masimu Quispe, the traitor of Supay.” She expected gasps of outrage, but none came. Perhaps they hadn’t heard her properly. “The man who betrayed the king and ushered in the death of—”
“We know who he is,” Nikolas reassured her. “Just don’t understand what that”—he gestured to the whole of the room—“has to do with this.”
“You don’t care that I’m the daughter of the man who breached the underworld and let in hordes of demons that terrorize the cities to this day?”
“How old were you when that happened?” Everyone turned to Reyes, but his attention was fixed on her, implication heavy in the curve of his brow and the line of his mouth. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Answer the question, Solana.”
“I was seven,” she offered grudgingly. In her mind, she should have been the first to see it coming.
Masimu was her father, after all. She spent all her time with him and worshipped the ground he walked on.
She tried to read his books and asked all the questions and listened to every answer.
She wanted to be just like him when she grew up.
“You were a child who barely knew her own mind,” Reyes said. “No one can expect you to have known the mind of your father and hold you accountable for his wrongs.”
“You have plenty of your own wrongs we can hold you accountable for,” Suri added.
Solana gave her a bland smile. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.”
Suri shrugged. “That’s because I didn’t trust you.”
“And now you do?”
“I distrust you less than I did before.”
Oskar’s hands began to move before Solana could respond. Nikolas was right. Why are we here? he asked.
All eyes were on her, waiting for an explanation. This thing she could do, the possibilities she held, they were no longer solely her own. They had never been. The thought was more of a comfort than she expected.
She pulled her dagger out of its sheath and gingerly placed it on the table.
The cool metal gleamed in the low light.
“Those stones were made with my blood,” she said, pointing at the crimson himaya.
“And whenever I kill muki with this dagger, I can feel it being released from the curse. A true death. I need to figure out a way to do that but on a much larger scale, and without killing anyone. Ideally.”
“You can … feel the curse?” Suri’s brow pinched in thought. “Can you feel it in us, right now?”
Solana shook her head. “No,” she answered regretfully. “I can only feel it when I kill.”
Nikolas strolled closer and eyed the blade. “What would happen if you killed one of us with it?”
With a snort, Solana crossed her arms and faced him. “I don’t know, Nikolas. Maybe we should find out.”
“Maybe we should,” he fired back. There was no amusement in his usually mirthful eyes. Only a cool calculation that made Solana question everything she thought she knew about him.
“You can’t be serious. That’s—”
“A great idea,” Cora interrupted. Everyone whipped around to stare at her while she pushed off the desk and walked toward the dagger.
“Maybe it would give you a better idea of what the curse feels like, and how to undo it. Reyes will be here to heal him,” she said, gesturing at Reyes still by the door.
“I can’t raise someone from the dead, Cora.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” She rolled her eyes. “He won’t die. He’ll just be right on the edge.”
“Exactly where I like to live my life,” Nikolas said with a clap. “Then it’s settled. When and where?”
Solana held out a hand. “Nothing is settled, Nikolas. You won’t have a life to live if we screw this up. Not to mention that getting stabbed hurts.”
“Pain is temporary,” Nikolas shot back.
“You are insufferable.”
Suri shook her head and approached the same table they were all standing around. “I feel like this is unsafe,” she said somberly. “Shouldn’t you test this on a muki first?”
It was Oskar who responded, his hands cutting through the air. She could, but it still wouldn’t solve the whole problem, which is the curse in all of us. He tapped his chest, right above his heart, and then left his finger there, all of them staring at the spot as if it held every answer. Right?
“Right,” Solana whispered, resigned. She looked at all their faces, gazes pinned on her, and knew what she had to do.
“You don’t have to do this right now,” Cora said and stepped closer, bright brown eyes soft with concern. She must have seen the look on her face and mistook it for apprehension. “We can wait a few days or find a—”
“No,” Solana interrupted. She glanced at Reyes, who was watching her closely. “The sooner we figure this out, the better.”
And then she would have to decide whether leaving was still her priority, and why.
If the curse was gone and she could live in Supay without the fear of being damned to become a monster, without the responsibility of releasing them, what reason would she have to leave?
What excuse would she give Sami, then? What lie would she tell herself?
The click of the lock shook her out of her thoughts.
Reyes was striding away from the door and toward her, each of his steps long and confident.
He came to a stop close enough that Solana had to crane her neck to meet his gaze.
“Can you do this?” he asked her, voice low.
When Solana started to turn her head, to find Cora or Nikolas or someone else to soften the intensity of Reyes’s attention, he slipped a hand around the back of her neck and held her in place.
“No, Solana. Look at me. Can you do this?”
There wasn’t any doubt in his question, not of her or her capabilities. It was as if he was asking if she was willing. If she could stab a living person and root around inside of him for the very thing she was trying to escape.
“Yes,” she breathed, steadied with his palm pressing into her pulse. “I can do it. Can you?”
He smirked, lips glistening in the low light. “I can.”
“Then let’s get this over with.” Nikolas threw an arm over each of them, smile wide and eyes glittering. “Where do you want me?”
Reyes rolled his eyes and pushed Nikolas toward a rug in the center of four chairs that Suri and Oskar were pushing farther back. “Lie on the floor. Take off your shirt, unless you don’t mind it getting ruined.”
“So demanding,” Nikolas purred. He tugged off his shirt in one quick movement, and Solana couldn’t help but take in the muscle, the scars, the years of hunting and fighting in the lines of his body.
And he would be lying prone beneath her blade. Willingly. Solana grabbed her dagger and squeezed it into a fist as she joined the others on the rug. Nikolas flopped down with a flourish, and Suri and Oskar dropped to their knees.
Cora stayed standing with a hand on one chair. “Too nervous to sit,” she said when Solana gave her a questioning look.
It was tempting to ask whether it was a good nervous or a bad nervous, but Solana decided against it and joined the others on the rug.
Nikolas shifted his arms behind his head as if he were waiting to be serviced at the brothel and closed his eyes.
“Do your worst, slayer,” he said, a lazy smile spread across his mouth.
Despite herself, Solana smiled. She placed a hand on Nikolas’s chest and leaned forward. Reyes’s hand joined hers, so much larger and warmer. “Ready?” he asked, the heat of his gaze driving into her temple.
The dagger was cold in her fist. She held it above Nikolas’s heart and took a steadying breath. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The air was thick enough to cut and felt as though it were pushing against her hand as she brought the dagger down and into Nikolas’s chest.
It landed true. She felt the thud of flesh and muscle and bone and then the warmth of blood pooling at the sight.
Intakes of breath rang out through the room.
But none from Nikolas. He lay steady and still, and it was only after several quick breaths that Solana felt the soothing pressure of Reyes’s gift.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and saw the veins in his neck straining with effort.
It reminded her of her purpose.
Beneath her left hand, Nikolas’s heartbeat began to soften. The tension in his body eased. And that was when she felt it. A serpentine hiss. A thread of a whisper. The dark beckoning her closer. The curse calling her name.
Solana embraced the urge to lean closer and squeezed her eyes shut.
So much of her life had been about letting go, cleaning up messes, reacting to turmoil.
But digging for the vein of the curse felt more intentional than anything she had ever done in her life.
A glaring acceptance of who she was and what she could do.
Beneath all of that, she felt the burden of four pairs of eyes sitting heavily on her shoulders. The weight was almost enough to scare her off, but she bore it with stubborn determination to test this one last theory. The end was so close she could almost taste it.
At that moment, all she tasted was fear, sharp and cold, as she slid deeper into the darkest parts of Nikolas to where the curse was manifesting in death.
It was almost impossible to steady her mind against the tide of doubt that rose to swallow her thoughts, but she worked to part and sink beneath the sea of truths she had told herself for so long.
That she was alone.