Aydun sighed. “There’s no such thing as privacy.”
“Instead, you chose silence and half-truths every time she asked if something was wrong,” Kyriel continued, undeterred. “And something was. It was eating you up—the mere idea that she didn’t trust you enough to come to you with her fears. The knowledge that she didn’t believe you could stop her before she needed to be put in the ground.”
“And the fact that she went to your…bestest friend in all the realms instead of you?” Aydun chimed in. “It rotted you.”
Their knowledge wasn’t surprising, nor was it unnerving. The part of me that could be unsettled had mostly died. But Aydun was wrong.
Hergoing tohimhadn’t rotted me.
I’d wanted her to be able to confide in him. Trust him. Rely on him. Rot, the kind he spoke of, was caused by two things: jealousy and hatred. I felt neither of those things toward him.
It wasn’t worth the effort to correct Aydun, though.
“Then again, both of them should’ve come to you and let you know what had been promised between them,” Aydun added with a shrug as my fingers tapped idly off the bone. “Poppy is not without fault.”
Fury coated my skin like slick ice. “Do not speak her name.”
“My bad.” He lifted his hands. A moment passed. “Can I say his name?”
“No.”
“All right, then.” Eyes that were blue, brown, and green rolled.
“Nice chair, by the way,” Kyriel said. “You do realize we could create one ourselves.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he replied blithely, a hint of amusement playing across his lips and then vanishing. “Though I don’t need to feed my ego with such endeavors.”
Fingers still tapping, I smiled at him.
Kyriel held my stare. “Or my vanity.”
I arched a brow.
Aydun approached the dais, crushing the vines beneath his boots as he made no attempt to avoid them. “I warned you. Told you that…sheof no name was the Harbinger, the Bringer of Death and Destruction.”
My tapping slowed. “Yet you failed to mention a few key details.”
“He did what he could for you to fill in the blanks, much to the rest of our displeasure,” Kyriel stated, sending Aydun a pointed look. “All of you should’ve been smarter.Youshould’ve been wiser,” he said, as if I had any desire to sit here and beinsulted by this fucker. “After all, you felt it inside you from the moment you woke from your stasis.Unia eta eram.”
Ruin and Wrath.
“You saw it in your own eyes when you looked upon your reflection.” Aydun crossed his arms. “Felt it every time you summoned the essence.”
Had I? Possibly. It didn’t fucking matter, though. “You stopped me while I was in Pensdurth.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew you were about to do something incredibly reckless.”
Reckless? Fuck that. “One of them had her blood on him.”
“He did.”
I could feel my flesh hardening and thinning. “And you stopped me from discovering why.”
