He didn’t see everything, then. The smallest amount of tension slips from my bones, the smallest hope that perhaps I might make my way out of this growing from the pit that sits heavily in my stomach. I keep my voice small. “I didn’t think you would offer me help if you knew.”
Duskbane takes a step—
Darian shifts, blocking him, and the prince stops short. “Get out of my way, Dare.”
A slow shake of Darian’s head makes my heart flip inside my chest. “I can’t do that.”
“Let’s take a moment,” Eres’s voice is careful. “Darian, whatexactlydid you see?”
It’s only then that I notice that Darian’s hands are trembling. He closes them into fists, keeping his back to me and blocking the prince. “He tortured her. Not once. Over and over again, even as a child.”
He addresses Duskbane. “Touch her skin. It’s…new. The Lightbringer healers must be as talented as you always said, Eres. Because from what I saw, they’ve put her back together from little more thanpiecesmore than once.”
“Where were you?” Eres looks horrified. “What viewpoint?”
“Hers,” Darian breathes, and I flinch again. He turns, just barely, to look at me. “I felt what she felt. And Erevan help me, but Ineverwant to be inside your head again.”
For some reason, my cheeks heat at the softness in his words. “Don’t you dare pity me. I don’t want your pity,walker.”
I shouldwantthem to pity me. And I would, if they were facing the version of me I intended to give them when I left Solvandyr. Soft, pretty, and a little bruised. A broken bird in need of healing.
But notme. The real me is stitched together from a thousand jagged pieces, built from twenty years of agony and goading and blood. The true Lyra Vaelion has scars far deeper than any riftlines these men wear in their skin. Deeper than any of them could likely even imagine. I haven’t a bone that hasn’t been broken, an inch of skin that hasn’t been peeled away with dagger and flame—all of it in the name of preparing me for a mission that was never going towork.
In the end, my father didn’t even believe I’d make it here at all.
I always thought my training was for a bigger purpose. That it would be worthwhile. I told myself that so many times—every time the healers worked on me, every time I bit down on my own tongue so I didn’t beg them to let me die, every time the father I barely knew as anything beyond my own torment entered a room with whatever weapon took his fancy that day and left with my blood coating his skin.
Only two people have ever met the real me. My father, and Cindral. And if the record holds true, I know well enough what comes next.
Bracing, I stare Kaelen Duskbane in the eye.
Both of us were born from rulers. Both of us born the same year, both born with a weight of expectation pressing down on our shoulders. But Kaelen Duskbane wears a crown, and I wear nothing but the bloody memories of my father’s disappointment.
He never had to face what I did, and resentment makes me spit the words at him. “Get it over with, then.”
If I have one, single regret, it’s Reena.
Let her be safe. Let it have been an empty threat.
Please.
“No,” Darian snaps. This time, he pushes his hands against Duskbane’s chest as if he’d physically restrain him, and the sight of him standing in the way for me only hurts more. “She was scared, Kaelen. If you saw what I did—”
“I was not scared.” I lift my chin up. If I’m to die, I refuse to be branded a coward. “Don’t lie.”
Darian whirls around. Amethyst eyes meet mine. “Not of us. Ofhim. All this tells us is that there were two monsters in your life instead of one.”
I don’t have an answer to that. Not one I’d care to voice, so I look past him. To the male watching me with silver-shredded eyes. “Make it quick.”
And Kaelen Duskbane… nods.
“Darian,” he says steadily. “Move aside.”
But Darian is shaking his head, hands still raised. “I’m not going to let you do this.”
“You’re going to fight me over a witch?” A hint of temper shows beneath Duskbane’s cool expression. “Really?”
“Add this to the list, although most of them mattered far less. If we were in the habit of punishing people for their parentage,” Darian says sharply, “I wouldn’t be standing here now.”
