“You will…but you also won’t.” Lucan’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest at my hollow smile. He sees right through it. “You’ll tell everyone you’re fine. You always do. But when you think no one’s looking, you stare like you want to save us all but know you can’t.” His voice drops, low enough to cut. “And that resentment is going to make you want to burn it all down.”
My jaw slackens. Mercy, he’s so close to the truth.
“I’d never burn it all down,” I whisper, though my throat tightens. “I want to save Vinguard. I want to see children playing in the sunlight, to walk beyond the gates, to know the world isn’t just stone and shadows and the red of the scourge.” The vicar and his Creed, however, could be nothing more than cinder if it were up to me. “But I can’t seem to find the strength. No matter how much they train me, I always come up short.”
“You are stronger than you think, Isola.” His voice is soft but firm.
I sigh. The pretending to always know what I am, what I’m supposed to be, and what I might really be is suddenly too much. “I want to be enough, Lucan. But I’m not who all of them think I am. I’m afraid I might never be.”
He shifts and leans even closer. Close enough I can feel the heat rolling off him. Close enough to touch if I just leaned in ever soslightly.
“Youareenough.” His warm, hazel gaze holds mine.
I shake my head, shoulders sagging, thinking of how the vicar could reduce me to such a pathetic state with such little effort. “No, I’m not. Not by any measure.”
“You are,” he insists. “I know you.”
“You know theideaof me, Lucan.” Guilt compels my words, making them hasty and messy. “I want to be enough to save Vinguard, save everyone—but I’mterrifiedof dragons.” The moment the confession leaves my lips, I want to pull it back, but I can’t. “You saw me on the first night—I freeze up. I run. I can barely handle them when they’re lying dead in the street.”
“You did fine in the pits.” He tries to get an edge in on the conversation.
I don’t let him. “It took a lot of effort just to be ‘fine.’ And that’s not even the half of it.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just holds my gaze, giving me the space to figure out my own words.
“I finally drew from the Font without a sigil—but not intentionally and not with purpose.”
Still nothing from him. So I keep going, the fear dragging the confession out of me. “It finally happened, I finally did it, and nothing has made me feel less like Valor Reborn. I didn’t feel like a crusader of hope. I felt…” My voice cracks, dropping. “I felt like I might be the monster. Something dark and twisted. Like fire was in my bones and I could turn this whole place to ash faster than I could save it.”
He continues to hold my gaze, patient. I don’t want to share any of this with him. But it’s like he knows I want to—needto. And, damn it, he’s right.
I speak even faster, little more than a hasty whisper. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why sometimes I have this power and sometimes I don’t. And it feels as though not knowing mighttear me apart…if whatever this thing inside of me is doesn’t do it first. My skin itches, sometimes doesn’t even feel like my own. My scar burns, my heart skips, I’m hot and cold all at once. Without my mum’s tinctures—”
“Tinctures?” His tone hardens.
I flinch. “Her research, generally, led to her finding a tincture that helps with…with whatever it is I have. Something changed in me the day that dragon attacked me—and not for the better. Maybe I’m just broken.” I don’t dare saycursed.
I watch the muscles in his jaw tense. He’s too smart not to hear what I’m avoiding saying. “You’re many things, Isola, but broken isn’t one of them.”
“Maybe I’m notbroken,” I admit. I try to shake the pathetic mood the vicar has put me in. It’s just so hard when an entire city expects more of you than is fair. “But I’m also not Valor Reborn.”
“Maybe you’re not Valor.” He says it so easily, like it’s not borderline treason, like every fear and worry I’ve ever had was unnecessary.
In a breath, it’s almost as if he’s lifted the veil of an identity that never fit. It might still be attached to me, but there’s a whisper of freedom that I’ve barely dared to imagine. Saipha is the only one who’s come close, but even she always carried the weight of a said, or unsaid,But what if you are?No one in my life, other than Mum, has ever accepted that I probably am not Valor Reborn.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t save this world,” he continues. “If anyone can find a way, it’d be you. And if not, Isola… You didn’t break it in the first place. It’s not even your responsibility to fix.”
“That’s…liberating.” The skipping in my chest finally calms. “But I want to fix it. I want to help humanity and heal the world, if I can.”
Lucan shifts, his hand sliding against the base of the dragonstatue. His fingertips touch mine, and I can’t decide where to look: the contact or his face. We were closer than this in the sundering pit, and yet something feels different now.
It’s because this is a choice. Him leaning closer. The way he seems to hold his breath. I ache, but it has nothing to do with what I fear is the curse. Every part of me feels so brittle. And, for the first time, I want to break. I want to be weak, just so his strong hands can be what puts me back together.
“Isola!” Saipha calls. The moment—whatever it was turning into—evaporates the instant she comes running.
Lucan straightens away, barely perceptible to anyone else, but it’s all I see. Especially as he curls his fingertips into a fist away from mine. Why is it that he always withdraws? Every time he does stings more than the last.
“Oh, good. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything bad happening up here. You missed Cindel absolutely losing it, furious that there are new kids joining the group from the Undercrust. Says it’s ‘against the Creed’s teachings’ like the vicar doesn’t get to dictate what those are.”
