He lowered his palms, and my chest caved in. He was wrecked, his eyes glazed with pain.
“I thought I was past it,” he rasped. “What I did for them.”
I rushed over and pulled him in my arms.
He let out a tense breath. “I hate that city.”
“I know.”
“None of the people I killed in Skalgard deserved their fate.”
I swallowed. “How did you survive it?”
He drew away from me and sighed, staring at me for a moment before he twirled his hand. Mist shimmered in his palm, transforming into a square object. A book—small, worn, the binding cracked. He held it out to me.
I took it carefully and opened it. The pages were yellowed, and each line listed a name in careful handwriting.
Hundreds of them, scrawled in over the decades.
Mira Voss, 32. Tomas Birch, 14. Elara Quinn, 7.
I flipped through pages, then stopped.
Senya Holt, 29.
The baker’s wife. She had a ridiculous laugh and used to slip me warm rolls when her husband wasn’t looking, but when a weevil blight ruined the wheat harvest, bread became too costly to make. So she offered herself for the Rite, giving her family enough grain to last ten winters.
Corvin Marsh, 43.The cobbler who fixed our shoes for half-price because we couldn’t afford more.Alia Venn, 16.A girl I’d played with as a child. Gods, I’d forgotten about her.
The tent blurred. I blinked, but the tears kept coming.
“I knew some of these people.”
I felt a spasm of pain with the names I recognized. Kairos watched me with a haunted desperation, like he expected me to run, but I swam in a tide of grief. For them and him.
The more pages I thumbed through, the more I admired him. I was curious about the fae who flinched when I asked about his wings. About the executioner whohated cruelty. About all the choices he made when no one was watching.
“I surrendered myself for peace, and they made me a butcher.”
My chest tightened until it hurt.
“The king wanted me to feel every death,” he whispered. “He wanted me ashamed and broken.”
“It didn’t work. This is proof of that.”
I closed the book carefully and pressed it to my heart. I pictured him alone in some dark corner, writing as an act of penance, and it hollowed my insides.
I gave it back to him.
He took it, staring at the cover. “Writing their names was the only way to honor them.”
“I’m so sorry you had to do that.”
Kairos flicked his wrist, the book vanishing in a swirl of white. “They begged me to save them, and I still had to look them in the eye and do it anyway.”
I touched his arm. “You showed me mercy.”
“That was instinct, not mercy,” he said quietly.
