“Brand can never know where I am.” Her voice cracked. “He can never find me or see me again. Once I’m gone, I no longer exist to him.”
“You’re asking me to destroy my best friend in this world.”
“No.” An invisible hand tightened around her throat, her eyes welling. So much for not caring. “I’m asking you to help me destroymyself,so I cansave him.”
“Lunara, that’s not?—”
“Do you think this is what I want?!” she wailed, the tears breaking free. “That this fucking tragedy is the ending I envisioned? The story that’s played out in my dreams?”
“I—”
She couldn’t take it anymore. It was just too much. Too much.
“I’m not asking you.” Lunara fell to her knees, her hands planting themselves into the soil. “I’mbeggingyou.”
She fucking hated the pity in his eyes—she had enough of it for herself, she didn’t need his.
“Please, Lunara, don’t— Shite.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, looking to the lightening sky. “Fine. It will be done.”
Brand’s eyes snapped open,the empty, untouched space on the other side of the bed staring back, taunting him, and heknewright down to his very soul—Luna was gone.
She’d fucking left him.
While she’d been passed out after the drama in the study, his father had guided him through building safeguards into the bond, to help the two of them cope. Brand had followed his father’s instructions and laid brick after brick between them to give her some space.
Stupidest fucking thing he’d ever done.
He should have let her feel his devastation. His ruin. Every raw lash of anguish tearing through him after she’d tried to fucking end herself like it was nothing. Maybe he’d have felt her shutting him out. Maybe he would’ve known what she was planning and they could’ve avoided this whole stars-damned travesty.
The betrayal was a crushing fist around his heart. He sucked in breaths, trying to stay calm. To think.
Damn it. He thought he’d gotten through to her. That she’d?—
Wait.
There, beneath the lingering moonlight and amber spice, was the faintest scent of caramel spirits and desert orange—and only one creature he knew drank that specific concoction. Someone whoterrifiedher.
No.
Brand’s roar shook Argoph to its foundations, from the monolithic pillars to the tiniest pebbles. The rage was so sudden, so blinding, that it stole his conscious mind.
He had no idea how he ended up in the throne room, the whole of the Weeping City awash in bloody, pounding hues, and he didn’t care.
No, there was only one fucking thing he cared about.
“Araxis!”
Stone surged like a roiling sea and courtiers scattered like insects, their screams nothing more than an irritating muffle beneath his furious bellows.
“Araxis aht Bordoroth, you come and fucking face me!”
Brand was going to choke the life out of his younger brother. If he’d hurt her, forced her…
All of the Evesong would pay. He’d tear Starkeep from the bloody fucking sky if he had to.
“Araxis, where is?—”
A spear pulled tight across his throat, strangling him. Vines shot up from the tempestuous floor, snapping at his arms and torso, coiling around his horns. Ice crackled through the carnage to seize his legs. Howls and curses shrieked above the din of the falls. Tighter and colder, more and more, until there was nowhere for his breaths to go and the world bled from crimson to spotty black.
