“I wasn’t there anyway,” she tells me. “Or maybe I was back there by that point, I have no idea. If I’m piecing the timeline together correctly, Midas had already...” She chokes on emotion, has to clear her throat before she can get the rest out. “It had already happened. Maybe I was already stuffed back into my room by then, I don’t know. I was pretty muddled.”
My ribs feel like they’ve been chained together. Not a single link allowing any give to breathe.
“I didn’t listen to my fucking instincts,” I tell her, anger at myself practically spitting out of me. “I tried to go see you again. I couldfeelthat something just wasn’t right, but Midas kept me too distracted. Before I could get to your room, he called all of us into more damn meetings before the ball was set to start. I was so tied up that I didn’t even realize the shit happening all around me. It was only when Lu showed up and signaled to me that I realized she’d found him.”
“Digby?” Auren asks.
“No. Ryatt,” I tell her. “Lu was looking for Digby, but she found my brother in a holding cell instead. Ryatt told her that he saw Digby being handed off to another set of guards. We had to wait for the ball to start before she could go back down to get Ryatt out, and then while she distracted the guards and led them back to the ball, Ryatt got Digby.”
She processes it all with a slow nod of her head, tipping like a buoy in the sea.
“Will you tell me what happened?” I ask, though I fucking hate the pain that it causes her.
“He drugged me.”
Her declaration makes my eyes flare. My entire fucking chest feels like it splits open, chains be damned. “He fucking what?”
She pauses at the seething horror in my tone, her gaze flicking down to where my spikes have all torn through my shirt, like the black fangs of a snarling beast.
“Like I said, I was a fool,” she goes on, a single shoulder lifting. “I let him lead me downstairs, and hedidbring me to Digby. That was the only honest thing he ever did.” Tears start to fall down her cheeks, her brow pulled into pain. “He was beaten. I thought he was dead at first. And I wasfurious. I wanted to hurt Midas. Make him hurt as much as Digby was hurting. But then he had me held against the wall and he...he...”
My chest cleaves. “Auren—”
“They hacked at my ribbons. One by one. I felteverything.” She’s trying not to cry, but the sobs squeeze her throat and make my own close up so tightly I can’t take a breath. “It hurt. It hurt sobadly.”
Where were you?
I didn’t just fail her. I allowed her to be fucking destroyed.
“I passed out after that—from the pain or the dew, or both. I woke up but only briefly, and then the next time I woke, I was given more dew. I don’t remember everything after that. Just snippets.”
My teeth ache with the sharpened canines that’ve shoved their way down, my cheeks itching with the scales that I know now adorn me. That whole day leading up to the ball, my stomach had felt like there were claws raking down it. But then, like a magnet drawing me in, I finally saw her that night. Up there on that balcony. And even though I didn’t know any of this yet, even though we had hundreds of people between us, I couldfeelit. Could see it in her erratic, fitful aura.
I thought you were going to come. But you didn’t.
I should’ve rotted the whole fucking ballroom right then and there.
The hate I feel for myself is so intense that my spikes throb down my spine, as if they want to stab me in half.
Auren sucks in a breath, and for a second, I think she’s just catching her breath, but when I see her eyes have dropped down, I follow her gaze to my arm. My arm, where my spikes are pulsing, and rivulets of blood have seeped through my torn skin.
I guess that explains why my back feels like I’m being chewed up, though it’snothingcompared to the pain I feel scouring through my chest.
“I’ve never seen that happen.”
I shake my head absently. “It hasn’t. Not for a long, long time.”
When I lift my head to look at her again, glittery lines from her tears are drying on her cheeks. Tears that never should’ve been there. Not if I’d done my fucking duty and protected her the way I promised.
Disgust consumes me, and I curl my hands into fists. “Where was I?” I say with a sigh, making her eyes slam back to mine. “I wasn’t fucking there.”
I wasn’t there.
While she drained her magic.
While she wasdrugged.
While she came face-to-face with a beaten and bloody Digby.
