My ribbons twist nervously upon the floor. “Whoareyou?”
Wick shifts in his seat, but he doesn’t look away as he answers. “My full name is Wickum Almon Turley.”
The breath catches in my chest, and his words roll through my mind.
Even though I knew it, saw the truth when he blocked the strike meant for me, and I watched the slice in his arm bleed gold, hearing him say it out loud feels like a punch to the gut.
“We’re related,” I say.
He nods. “We’re second cousins, strictly speaking. We share the same great-grandmother. Your mother and my father were cousins. But you’re the more direct line from Saira Turley,” he explains. “Think of it this way: you’re the capital, I’m the outskirts.”
“But why did you keep it from me? Why not tell me right away? You knew—” I cut off my words as soon as I feel my throat closing up. I can’t help the emotions twisting my throat and strangling my vocal cords, but I hate sounding so vulnerable.
Beside me, Slade tenses, but he gently puts his hand on my thigh, giving me a comforting squeeze. A ribbon comes up and strokes over his fingers.
Wick runs his hand through his hair in another surprising show of his own emotion. Except maybe it’s not so surprising—not after what the two of us have gone through. We fought for our lives. We watched his friend and right hand be murdered right in front of him. We saw each other get captured, Oreans executed, Emonie dragged away. He and other Vulmin were nearly whipped and killed in a public display.
And now we’re here, after all of that, sitting across from each other and trying to find our footing after our lives have been shaken.
“It wasn’t just you. Very few Vulmin knew that I carried the Turley name. Only those I trusted most.”
Realization dawns. “Ludogar knew.”
He nods, the muscles in his jaw tensing. “But I didn’t want anyone to know, especially you. Not yet.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head and then slumps so that his next words are spoken down to the table, his gaze locked on the knots in the wood. “I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want to tell anyone…because I’m a traitor who doesn’t deserve to carry the Turley name.”
A frown slices down my expression while dread slices down my stomach. “What do you mean?”
He looks up at me then, dark eyes the color of soil after being drenched in rain. There’s a heaviness in them, as if they’re saturated through with a weighty truth he hasn’t been able to unbury.
But he does now.
His answer topples out, unearthing the buried burden in one fatal scoop.
“That night in Bryol, when you were taken with the other children, I was there,” he admits, and my pulse pounds in my ears so hard it sounds like drums. “I was there, Auren, and Iletthem take you.”
CHAPTER 39
AUREN TURLEY
I shake my head, tryingto roll around the information so it will settle and make sense. Slade is rigid with fury, his eyes narrowed and jaw muscles jumping.
But Wick looks at me with dueling expressions. One side guilt, and the other side resolved, like that part of him already knows the outcome of this talk.
“You were there that night? When Bryol was attacked?” I ask. Though he already admitted it, I can’t believe my ears.
“I was. My family had come to visit yours. Our two households were the last of the Turley family, but my parents and I lived in a place called Dramor. Without a fairy ring, it was a three-week journey for us to get to Bryol. The last time I’d visited, I didn’t even remember. You were just a baby, and I was a toddler.”
My heart pounds. “Keep going.”
Wick flattens his hands on the table like he’s bracing himself. “I was jealous of you.”
I rear back in surprise, and my ribbons skitter against the floor. That’s not what I was expecting.
“My parents doted on you.Everyonedid. Everyone called youlittle sun. The entire city was smitten.” His mouth pulls into a tightened, shameful grimace. “You probably don’t remember,but I locked you in a closet once. You cried until your father found you. My own father lectured me for hours about it—about the importance of family. Of loyalty, kindness. And you…I thought you were going to hate me, but you just smiled and asked if I wanted to play. You forgave me, forgetting it before I even got done being lectured.”
