Chapter 48 #3
Liora’s face contorted, as if she’d been slapped.
She did not speak at first; the silence between them was thick, a clotted thing, desperate for air.
Sabine became aware of the ache in her own jaw, the way her hands curled white-knuckled around her valise, how her feet were rooted to the mosaic like the statue of some ancient martyr.
The moment stretched, elastic and terrible, until the wordless tension threatened to snap.
Liora’s lips flattened into a bloodless line. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Sabine said. Each syllable scraped out of her throat.
She could feel Lady Delarine’s gaze upon them, but in that instant, there was only her and Liora, the axis about which every disaster spun.
Liora took a halting step forward. Her perfect poise was beginning to fracture, lines gathering at the corners of her mouth.
“I never wanted this. I never wanted to be the sister of a criminal. Or to have my life shattered every time you decided to sacrifice yourself for some… for some noble ideal.” The last words broke, like pearls scattering from a snapped necklace.
Sabine flinched, recoiling before she could mask the pain.
“I sacrificed everything for you. Do you hear me, Liora?” Tears threatened, but she willed them immobile.
“I gave up my future so that you could have one. So you wouldn’t be sold off in some blood vow to a man who’d treat you as a broodmare and a bauble.
I worked until my hands were raw, I starved myself to pay your tuition, I endured every humiliation, just to keep you safe. ”
Liora shook her head. “I never asked for your sacrifices! You act like you’re the only one who has ever suffered.
The world is not yours to martyr yourself for.
I never wanted you to ruin your own chances, or mine, for the sake of your principles.
I would have been happy with an arranged blood vow.
Maybe not a grand romance, but security.
Safety. You never stopped to think that maybe a life full of dinners and galas and fine jewels would have suited me just fine.
Instead, now, I have to bear the pitying stares and whispers that follow me everywhere as the sister of the Registry’s favorite scapegoat. ”
Sabine’s vision prickled with unshed tears.
Fury and grief warred inside her ribcage.
Words spiraled out of her, uncontrolled.
“You’re lying to yourself. The Registry’s system eats girls like us for breakfast. If you think life as a Gilt ornament is better than what I’m fighting for, then you haven’t been paying attention. ”
“Oh, I’ve been paying attention,” Liora spat, venom dripping from each word.
“Every act of kindness from you was a leash. Every shared laugh a reminder that I owed you my life. You never let me forget that I was your burden. Your project. You wanted to save me, but you never asked if I wanted to be saved.” Her hands balled at her sides.
“Any wish I had that didn’t fit your vision of the perfect life, with the loving husband and caring family, was just a symptom of my weakness.
Wanting something different was always, always, a betrayal to you. ”
Sabine reeled, heart juddering in her chest. “That’s not true,” she said, but the defense sounded hollow.
“It is true. You can’t see it, but it’s always been true.
You talk about the Registry like it’s a wolf at the door, but you refuse to see that not all of us were born with a self-destructive, rebellious streak.
Some of us believe in the rule of law. In the goodness of order.
I don’t want any part of your chaos. I never did, and I certainly do not now. ”
Sabine could not process the words, not all at once. Her mind kept skipping, tripping over the bitterness in Liora’s voice. “So you would sell me out to them?”
Liora’s answer was immediate. “If it meant you’d finally let me live my own life, yes. If it meant I could walk into the city without feeling a hundred people watching, waiting for me to misstep—yes, I would. I did.”
Sabine’s mouth tasted of ash. It was too much, too ugly, too sudden; it was like learning a word in a foreign tongue and feeling your own language grow meaningless by comparison. “What about loyalty? I did it all so you wouldn’t have to—”
“But I want to!” Liora was weeping now, but she did not wipe her tears. “I want to belong. I want to be normal. There’s nothing noble in martyrdom, Sabine. There’s only bitterness, and loneliness, and dragging everyone else down with you.”
It was as if they stood on a battlefield, each brandishing a weapon but too heartsick to swing.
The words rattled through Sabine, found every soft part of her, and hollowed it out.
She thought of the birthdays she’d tried to make special with nothing but a scrap of cake and a promise that things would get better, someday.
She thought of the time she’d pulled a feverish Liora from the creek behind their estate in the valenhold, lungs full of cold water, and how that terror—the fear of losing her—had shaped every decision since.
She thought of the nights Liora must have spent alone, listening to the echoes of Sabine’s arguments from behind closed doors, watching her older sister walk headlong into every disaster, every fight, every heartbreak.
Lady Delarine’s whisper was enough to slice through the storm. “Children,” she murmured, “perhaps this is not the moment—”
“Let her say it,” Sabine rasped. “Let her say all of it. I want to hear her reasons from her own mouth.”
Liora wiped her face, but her hands shook so badly she could barely manage the gesture.
“Maybe it makes me horrible, but I wanted the Registry to take you away and finally be done with the waiting, the fear, the way your choices made me collateral damage in a story that was never mine.” The confession was a dam breaking, a flood of bitterness.
“So yes, I wrote to them, because if I am the one who turns you in, then my loyalty to them cannot come into question. I’m sorry, Sabine, but I had to.
Otherwise, you would have pulled me in with you, and I’m not brave enough for that. I never wanted to be.”
Her loyalty… to them. Sabine staggered back, gutted. Lady Delarine steadied her by the elbow.
“Please,” Sabine said—hoarse, desperate. “Your Grace, I cannot—please take me anywhere else. Anywhere but here.”
Lady Delarine’s expression softened. “Of course.” Turning back to Liora, her voice sharpened, hard as diamond.
“I’m afraid, Miss Almarien, that you can no longer remain at Braythar House.
Whatever choices you have made, I cannot abide a breach of trust in these walls.
Collect your things. You will be leaving as soon as the Registry concludes its business. ”
Liora’s face went blank as a mask. “Fine,” she said, the word brittle. She brushed past Sabine without a glance, the scent of her perfume clinging in her wake. Sabine pressed a fist to her mouth, fighting not to sob.
They lingered in one of Lady Delarine’s private parlors until the sound of authoritative voices drifted down from the entrance hall.
When she reappeared, the Inspector seemed almost disappointed. “You will remain in the Duchess’s company at all times, Lady Vaelros. Your correspondence and movements will be monitored. If you attempt to leave, you will be detained and delivered directly to the High Binder.”
Sabine inclined her head, saying nothing. The words echoed like a bell inside her—detained, delivered, Binder—each one a link in the chain that now yoked her to Lady Delarine’s shadow.
Liora awaited in the corridor, her performance already in motion.
She clutched a handkerchief, every inch the wronged innocent.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, Inspector, but—am I even safe, living in the same house as a criminal?
I’ve tried to do my duty, truly I have, but to betray one’s own sister—what could wound a girl’s heart more? ”
Sabine’s jaw locked. There should have been a limit to Liora’s performances, some bottom to the well of her melodrama, but she was clearly just getting started.
The Registry Inspector regarded Liora with the cool satisfaction of a cat that had cornered a canary.
“You’ve shown exceptional loyalty to the Empire, Miss Almarien.
Acts such as yours do not go unnoted. You will be provided with accommodations suited to your station and appropriately compensated.
There’s honor in choosing principle over sentiment. ”
Liora dipped her head, a single tear tracking down her cheek—perfect, damning. “Thank you, Inspector. I only did what I thought was right.”
Sabine wanted to shout. None of this was right.
For cycles, it’d been just the two of them, clinging to each other in the wreckage of their parents’ deaths.
Liora would never have survived the last twelve cycles without Sabine, without someone to fight off the hunger and the fear and the slow, sick decay of hope.
Sabine had mended Liora’s torn dresses and dried her tears, learned the subtle agony of trading her own dignity for their joint survival.
The cycles rose around her now, a tide of memories, all of them rendered hollow by the sight of her sister curtsying to authority.
She was about to yell at her sister again, but Lady Delarine squeezed her arm, warning her to keep her silence. So Sabine did, and only the sound of Liora’s footsteps remained, retreating for the final time. A door closed somewhere below.
Sabine stood unmoving, hollowed, as if every memory had been burned out of her. The ache in her chest was so real she wondered if this was how hearts truly broke—fiber by fiber, until only the scaffold of duty remained.
Lady Delarine moved first. She touched Sabine’s shoulder, as if steadying a child who might collapse at any moment. “Sometimes, if you wish to heal the world, you must first shed the parts that poison you.”
Sabine let the words wash over her. She tried to think of a reply, but her mind was a tangle.
Behind her eyelids, she saw the creek at the valenhold, the two of them as children, catching tadpoles in a chipped porcelain cup.
Liora’s laughter had been bright and effortless back then, before the world had started making its demands.
Sabine had been fourteen cycles old when she first swore she would always protect her little sister.
She’d believed it with the full, unbreakable power of a child’s promise, the kind that assumed forever was within reach.
Now, the memory felt like a knife twisting in her soul.
There was no salve for a wound like this, no gentle turning away from betrayal. If anything, it only sharpened her resolve. What was left to lose, now?
She wiped her tears, straightened her spine, and found her voice. “I will destroy them,” she whispered. “If it’s the last thing I do. I will see the Registry’s lies unmasked.”
Lady Delarine smiled, slow and dark and wholly approving. “That is what I’d hoped to hear.”
She imagined the final, invisible thread snapping between herself and Liora—a clean, irrevocable break. She would mourn her sister later. For now, she needed to survive the assault and make the Empire pay for ever thinking they could sacrifice her as a pawn .