Were they actuallyhurt?
He hadn’t felt this way in years, not since he was a child, laughed at for his weaknesses.
But Ezer wasn’t done landing hits. She curled her fingers around the bars, while the raphon hid behind her. “I was perfectly fine, making progress the past many days without you. You could have left me for dead, and you wouldn’t have known. You wouldn’t have cared, until you came back to find your precious little project pet sitting over my corpse!”
Every word hit him like a punch to the gut.
A stab of his monster’s claws.
She was right.
She wasright,gods be damned.
He had hurt her.
Deeply.
He could see the pain all over her face, the very same expression he’d worn for most of his life. He opened his mouth to speak, to say something,anythingto reel the moment back in...but she wasn’t done yet.
“To you, I am just another servant. Just as my uncle was.” She let out a deep, trembling breath. And shame washed over him anew, for not telling her about her uncle. The bastard stillrotting in the cell beneath her very feet. “You’ve no care for the fear I have encountered, the sleep I have lost, and have you thought for onesecondwhat it is like to be me?”
Of course I have,Kinlear thought, but then...
You’re lying to yourself, Little Prince,Magus’ voice called out to him.You’ve spent so much time peering beyond the Veil, into the future, that you’ve forgotten all about the here and now.
That was another flaw he’d noticed in himself. He was Veilborne, so he lived half his life -- even more than that, when he was in runic sleep -- in a different timeline entirely. And sometimes it felt impossible to stay rooted to the present. To remember that no one else buthehad seen what would come to pass.
So, he took her onslaught of attacks, because he deserved them.
Every damned word.
She continued, and he swore there were tears in her eyes now. “To be ripped from a tower – where I spent two years alone behind a locked door just like this one. And furthermore, if you’ve no respect for me, Prince, then consider what it is like to be Six. To be born and raised in the confines of a cage.”
He blinked at her, as her words washed over him.
His face was red and hot and...
And he was furious, every bit as he was falling more forher.Because sheunderstood. Gods, she understood, like nobody else ever had, what it was like to feel trapped. For her, it was a tower, and then a raphon cage, but for him?
For him, it was his own mind. Years of running from a monster, years of dying in his dreams, but even when he was awake, he couldn’t escape it. He lived his life the way he’d once told Soraya in a tear-stained letter, and he’d meant every word.
He was born in the shadows.
He was born as an echo, an afterthought, the dying side to his brother’s living light.
And it wasn’t even the crown. He didn’t give one godsdamned iota about the crown, for he saw the weight Arawn carried with it. No, for Kinlear, his burden was his own body, an eternal prison that he longed to be set free from. But it was impossible, for he couldn’t escapehimself.
This illness was his fate. His body, his cage...and he wouldn’t escape from either until the Five called him home.
Until then, he would struggle. He would spendso much godsdamned timedrowning in the sea of his own sleep, the way Marin had. He would carry her blade, terrified of ever putting it down, to the point that he’d demanded heneverbe put into a runic sleep without it. Because it he was?
He would risk missing out on seeing everythingthat sat in waiting up ahead.
Everything that he lived in constant fear of never getting the chance to experience inthisbody, weak as it was.
And that was Kinlear Laroux’s biggest fear:
That he would die...before he truly got tolive.
