I whirl around, stopping just beneath the tail-end of the mountain’s blue vein. “If you’re going to try to make some male chauvinistic claim that everything I did was really somehowyourdoing, then you can save it, because that was all me. I don’t care if you’re trying to say that to be noble or because you think it will help assuage my guilt, but—”
He gives me a tortured look and bites out, “I fuckingrotted you, okay?”
His words don’t just cut me off—they splice right down my middle, making me sway. My mouth opens and closes as I try to come to terms with what he just said.
“What?”
He stalks forward, booted steps echoing on the rock, while cold air presses up against my back like a frigid bystander. When he’s right in front of me again, one side of his face is lit up with blue, the other cast into shadows.
“I rotted you,” he repeats, but hearing it again doesn’t help. “What do you remember?”
My brows pull together and I shake my head, glancing away, eyes locked on the rifts in the cave. “I...”
WhatdoI remember? It’s hard to tell since I’ve been actively trying not to.
I remember I snapped. I remember that this depth of pure, unmitigatedpowersuddenly coursed through me. I remember killing. It was so easy—I think that’s what gets me the most. That, and this sense that I wasn’t whollyme. There was a beast inside me, famished and furious, ready to devour the world.
But before I could go on that rampage, someone stepped in front of me.
I see it now, flashes of fragments, like torn bits of paper held briefly under the candlelight. The way he begged me to let the power go, the chokehold that terror had on me.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t, because without the beast to control the magic, I was incapable. I didn’t know how to stop it. All I could do was hold onto the reins, hoping Slade could get out before it snapped. But of course, he didn’t. Of course he refused to leave me.
The ashen kiss he placed against my gilded lips was all I felt before an invasive breeze slipped down my throat. And then a whisper, echoing in my ear,Forgive me.
My eyes flick back to Slade, and he must sense that I’m remembering, because he nods.
“You rotted me?”
Images spring up in my head, none of them pleasant. Rotten corpses of soldiers left at Sixth Kingdom’s border, their bodies puffed up and reeking in the snow. Then, Midas’s guards barring me from getting out of the room, Slade coming in and rotting them where they stood until their faces went sunken and hearts decayed. And another, of him walking toward Ranhold, leaving roots of rot in every step’s wake, poisoning the snowy ground.
Was I like one of those sunken-in corpses? Lips peeling back, organs decayed into husks? I look down at my skin, as if I’m going to see evidence, but everything looks normal.
“The rot wasn’t visible like that,” he tells me, once again so in tune with my train of thought that he seems to always anticipate what I’m thinking.
His expression turns agonized. “You were…dying.” The words choke out, his shoulders bent with blame. “I didn’t fucking know what to do, but I couldn’t just stand there and let you drain yourself. So I used my power against you.”
I let his words settle in, slowly shaking my head. “No. You used your poweronme, not against me. Because you’re right, I was dying.”
He flinches—so subtly that I barely catch it. “I… You’re not angry?”
A frown plants itself between my brows. “Why would I be angry?”
Now he looks positively bewildered. “I fuckingrottedyou, Auren. Stole into your body and shut it down, putting you in a stasis of spoiled decay.”
My nose wrinkles. “Well, I could do without the visual ofstasis of spoiled decay,” I mutter.
“I risked your life,” he goes on, and I realize these are the words that have been running through his head since the moment he used his magic on me, that he’s been tormenting himself with self-proclaimed blame. “I used my power against you, and then I kept you like that when I took you and got you as far away from your gold as I could, risking your lifeagainwith every minute that I waited.” He pulls at his hair in frustration, glancing around the darkness like he’s looking into the crevices of his own guilt. “What if I’d waited too long? What if I hadn’t been able to reverse it?”
“You’ve been hating yourself this whole time.” It’s not a question—I can see the truth plainly, can hear it in the way he’s talking. Gently, I take his hand in mine, squeezing his fingers. “You saved me,” I say quietly, and he looks at me like he’s desperate to see me, like he can’t bear to look away or else be swallowed by those shadows of fault.
He slumps slightly, head tilted up at the ceiling as he lets out a breath. “There’s something else.”
My stomach tightens. “What is it?”
He tips his head back down to look at me. “When I reversed the effects of the rot and removed my power from your body...a piece of it stayed behind.”
A piece of it stayed behind.
