54. Chapter 54
AMARIA
The cell was cold. Stone against my back, iron around my wrists, and the sting of fresh scrapes on my knees from where I'd stumbled on the stairs coming down.
They hadn't been gentle. A guard's gauntlet had caught the back of my neck when I'd turned to look behind me, and the welt still throbbed—a dull, hot pulse against the cold.
The door had sealed with a sound like a coffin lid, stone grinding against stone, and then silence so total my ears rang with it.
Caden. Caden was close now.
The thought pierced through the haze. My brother. Somewhere in this labyrinth of cells and chains and forgotten things. Close enough that the Griefweaver could find him even through suppression.
Close enough to kill me.
It started small.
A twitch in my fingers. A flutter behind my eyes. The kind of sensations you dismiss—tired, stressed, too much magic spent on turning a General to ash and inverting gravity.
Then my hands started shaking.
Violent spasms that rattled the shackles against my wrists, sent jolts of cold fire up my arms. I braced my palms flat against the floor, trying to still them.
They wouldn't still.
What—
The first wave hit.
Pain. Not mine. Caden's. Detonating through the Griefweaver like a backdraft blowing a door off its hinges. My back arched and my jaw clenched so hard teeth cracked—
The suppression cuffs burned.
They were supposed to dampen my Marks. Contain them. But the pain from Caden kept coming—relentlessly pouring through a channel that had never been meant to hold this much. And the cuffs wouldn't let it out. Wouldn't let me process it, vent it, do anything except absorb.
I was a bottle filling with fire.
And there was nowhere for the fire to go.
My vision went white. Then red. Then nothing at all.
Sound disappeared. Time stretched and snapped like overstrained rope. My body convulsed on the stone. Distant. Vague. Foam or blood leaking from my mouth. Fingers clawing at nothing.
Caden.
His name was the only thing that stayed.
Caden is drowning. Caden is burning.
The Griefweaver reached for him over and over. Instinct. The bone-deep need to help, to share the weight, to do what I was built to do.
But the cuffs caught it. Trapped it. Turned my own gift into a closed loop with nowhere to discharge.
Energy built in my chest. My skull. Behind my eyes. I was absorbing all his pain and the cuffs wouldn’t let me release it.
Too much. Too much. Too much.
I screamed.
No sound came out.
The second wave was worse.
Caden's pain layered on top of the first—fresh torture, new wounds. I tasted his blood in my mouth. His fear on my tongue. His desperate, clawing love still reaching for me even as they broke him apart.
Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.
His First Vow. Echoing through the connection. Trying to shield me even now.
Stop, I wanted to tell him. Stop trying to save me. Let me help you.
But I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. Could only lie on the cold stone and shake while my nervous system burned itself out from the inside.
The cuffs hummed. Unyielding.
This is how I die.
The thought was distant. Almost peaceful.
In the dark. Alone. Three walls away from my brother. While the King drinks wine above us.
My heart stuttered. Skipped. Stuttered again.
At least Caden won't die alone now.
The third wave didn't come.
Or maybe it did and I couldn't feel it anymore. Maybe my body had simply... stopped registering. Nerves burned past the point of sensation. Pain receptors that had given up and gone quiet.
I lay on the floor. Stared at the ceiling. Watched shadows move across the stone in patterns that might have been torchlight or might have been my brain dying.
Eryndor.
His name drifted through the dark. I reached for the tether.
The golden thread that always hummed between us.
I clawed for it, needing his warmth, needing his solid, immovable presence.
Nothing. The stone walls were too thick.
The cuffs were too strong. I was screaming for him with everything I had left, and for the first time since we met, he couldn't hear me.
'I would burn it all down,' he'd said. I should have let him.
I should have let him take the match. I should have let him tear this palace apart stone by stone.
I was supposed to tell him about Caden. I was supposed to get his help. I was supposed to—
A spasm rocked through me. My spine curved. My heels drummed against the floor.
I was supposed to save my brother.
The Griefweaver pulsed weakly. Still reaching. Still connecting with Caden, to share his burden, to do the one thing it existed to do.
The cuffs held.
The pain had nowhere to go. So it went inward and stayed there.
My mouth tasted like rust and bile. My fingers were curled into claws against the stone, locked there, the tendons refusing to release. When I finally forced them open, the joints popped one by one, loud in the silence.
I don't know how long I lay there.
Minutes. Hours. Weeks. Long enough for the cold to seep into my bones and stay. Long enough for the shaking to slow from violent to subtle to barely-there. Long enough for my nervous system to overload, short-circuit, and permanently go quiet.
This is what he feels. Every moment. Every day.
The thought was almost funny.
I've been complaining about silk cages and grey dresses. And Caden has been here. Burning. For years.
Tears leaked from my eyes. I didn't have the strength to wipe them away.
I'm sorry.
The words were for him. For Serenya. For Maxx. For Eryndor, who I'd promised to explain everything to and might never see again.
I'm sorry I wasn't faster. Smarter. Stronger.
The darkness crept in at the edges.
I'm sorry I couldn't save anyone.
My eyes closed. The Griefweaver kept reaching.
The cuffs kept holding. And somewhere, three walls away, my brother screamed into the dark.
I tried to scream back. I tried to hold on.
But there was too much of it. It rose over my head.
It filled my lungs. It burned away my name, my memories, the very idea that a me existed separate from the pain.
It just crowded out everything else until there was no room left for the sister who wanted to save her brother.
Or the girl who wanted to be saved by the boy.
There was only the dark. There was only the fire.
Finally, I was the void they always said I was.