Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“You think this is pain?” I growled. “Try starving under a butcher’s tent. Try watching your mother die for a sack of coin because the man who led us said mercy was for the weak.”
His breath caught.
“You think you know Riven?” My voice barely stirred the air. “Because I do. I know the way he smiled after a kill. The way he told me I’d be nothing more than a shadow. You think I won’t gut you like he taught me to?”
I drove the knife into his shoulder, not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to make him scream again.
“Do it.” He gasped. “You’ve done worse.”
I reached for his other arm.
“Erindor.”
Her voice.
Wyn.
Soft but firm. Cutting through the noise like a bell in a blizzard.
My hand trembled. The blade hovered, slick and shaking.
Then I felt her fingers on my wrist.
To remind me.
Of who I am now, of who she saw when she looked at me.
I blinked.
The blood blurred.
I stood still.
The merc was sobbing now. Quietly. His mouth was red; his body slumped.
I turned away from him, meeting Wyn’s eyes. They were wide and worried but not afraid.
Not of me.
“He’s not worth it,” she whispered.
But he was.
He knew the name. He’d said it like a vow.
“Leave him tied,” I said, my voice raw. “We are moving soon.”
And for a long moment, no one spoke.
Wynessa
His hands weren’t shaking.
That was what terrified me most.
Blood dripped from his knuckles. It ran in slow rivulets down his forearms, pooling at the edge of one sleeve before soaking into the fabric. Some of it had dried already, smeared like old paint across the side of his neck. His blade was still in his hand.
He hadn’t even bothered to clean it.
I had never seen Erindor like that before. Not even during the Vorrhound ambush. Not even when the raiders charged at us with blades drawn and murder in their eyes. Then, he’d been swift. Focused. Protective.
But this…this wasn’t protection.
This was punishment.
He had hurt that man not to save us. Not to stop a threat, but because he wanted to. He needed answers, and he knew exactly how to make a body scream them out.
The name ‘Riven’ seared him, a sudden, sharp pain that made him react with rage.
It broke him. Or maybe that broken part slipped free again.
He walked away from the ruins as if nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t tortured someone in front of us. Like his boots weren’t trailing red behind him.
I followed.
He didn’t slow when I caught up. He didn’t glance at me. Just kept moving with long, rigid strides, jaw locked tight.
“Erindor,” I said, quietly at first. “What was that?”
No answer.
“You knew him,” I pressed. “Or the name. Riven.”
Still nothing. Only the crunch of leaves underfoot and the sticky sound of drying blood flaking off leather.
“Tell me, please.”
“I said we’re moving,” he snapped, finally turning his head enough for me to see the flash of cold rage in his eyes.“Don’t push this right now, Princess.”
I stopped in my tracks, stunned by the bite in his voice. He never called me by name like that.
A pause. He must have felt it too, because he stopped walking.
His shoulders heaved once. Then again.
“Do you really want to know?” he asked, still not looking at me. “Because once I tell you, it will not fit into whatever neat, noble idea you’ve built of me.”
I swallowed hard. “I’m not afraid.”
“You should be,” he growled, whipping around to face me.
The sight of him stopped my breath.
Blood painted his neck. His jaw. His hands. Some of it had splattered across his chest like a second crest. There was dirt smudged beneath his eyes, and something darker behind them.
Not anger.
History.
“So, you believe this is me?” The words were barely breathed, laced with a chilling certainty. “A broken blade, always seeking flesh? Well, you’d be right.”
“No,” I refuted, my head shaking a silent denial as my heart struggled against its confines.
His laugh was short and bitter. “You didn’t see what I wanted to do to him. You stopped me. If you hadn’t stopped me…”
I stepped closer, even though my legs screamed not to. Even though I didn’t recognize this version of him, his furious, blood-soaked echo of the boy I trusted.
“You think I don’t see you?” I whispered. “But I do. I see all of you, Erindor. And that’s what scares me.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him.
And then, he turned and strolled away from me.
Deep down, past the fear, past the ache in my chest, something even more dangerous stirred within him.
A part of me understood that kind of rage. The bone-deep grief that makes you want to hurt the world before it can hurt you again.
And that terrified me most of all.
That night, I opened my journal. My hands still smelled faintly of blood and lavender oil.
I don’t know what scared me more—what he did to that man, or how familiar it felt watching it.
Erindor’s hands didn’t shake. His voice didn’t rise. But I saw something in him fracture open, and I didn’t look away.
I should have.
But I didn’t. And that means something.
Maybe because I understood. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to know there’s a kind of pain that turns your skin into armor. That hollows you out so you don’t have to feel the next blow. Rage isn’t always chaos. Sometimes it’s memory sharpened to a blade.
And I wonder if that’s what I’m becoming, too. Someone who would burn the world down to keep one person breathing.
I used to think mercy was my greatest strength. But now I’m starting to wonder if I ever meant the fire in me to be kind.
I still trust him. But part of me is afraid that we’re both becoming people we won’t recognize when this ends. And gods help me…Part of me doesn’t mind.
-W