Barrett contemplated my question. “I think she cared in her own way, yes. But I don’t think she was capable of love as we know it.”
Love as we know it. That was a concept I needed to relearn. I’d seen Barrett with Dax after the battle, tangled together upon their reunion. While he certainly knew love, I’d been too destroyed by my father and his mother to know what love truly felt like anymore. I triedto hang on to the memory of it—the way I’d felt with Ophelia before we’d changed—but even the bright moments I could recall were fleeting, overshadowed.
“I don’t think he knew her plan,” I stated, curiosity bubbling in my gut. “At least, not all of it.”
“Really?” Barrett raised a brow.
“I think they both had secrets.” I looked over my shoulder at the ruined office and swore to myself I’d find out what my father’s were. “Thank you for saving Ophelia,” I added after a beat of silence.
I knew he didn’t do it for me, but if he’d wanted to spite me as badly as I once had him, he could have let her suffer more. But no, while he may be an Engrossian, sired by the wicked queen herself, Barrett was undoubtedly good.
“Of course.” He waved me off, but his expression turned pensive. He ran a hand through his black curls, similar to my own. “You truly love her, don’t you?”
A sharp pang went through my chest, heart rattling. I inhaled around it, looking over the expanse of mountains. Peaks jutted into the clear blue sky of the summer day and reached hopeful hands toward the heavens. I waited for the Bind to ache, but nothing came.
“I always will,” I admitted. I think he understood that it was in a different way than before. A piece of me would always belong to Ophelia. It would live with the boy and girl we used to be, in the future they should have had.
And it was inked in the promise of our Bind, unbreakable yet faulty. Our souls were connected whether we wanted to be or not.
“She’s our best hope,” Barrett said.
“Hope,” I scoffed. Another thing I didn’t have. But inadvertently, I remembered crystal blue eyes and a whispered conversation in a decrepit temple, and I thought maybe I could find it.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Ophelia
I scratchedat the Curse mark on the inside of my wrist and gritted my teeth, eyes locked on the dark wood door. The slice on my arm from Kakias’s blade still ached. Though the stitches holding my flesh together had faded into my skin and the wound was healed, an echo of dark power pulsed within the scar.
And I hated it.
The way it burned, like my blood was revolting against it, twisted my gut. Rina had leached the venom from that blade out of me using a slow process of needles and tonics. Or at least, that’s what she’d said when I woke. I’d slept through the entirety of it, waking two days ago in a fierce sweat, thinking Kakias was standing over me.
It had been Jezebel, though.
“Thank the fucking Spirits,” she’d sobbed, throwing herself at me, holding tight. I’d blinked as my head caught up to what was happening. We’d sat like that for an hour, tears silently streaming together, soothing whispers exchanged, sinking into the realization of our father’s death.
Once Santorina had assessed me, Barrett and Malakai filled me in on the spotty parts of my memory—told me what had happened while I was off fighting Kakias and how the city was fairing since.
“Not well, but it could be worse,” Cyph had said from his seat across from my cot. His expression was vacant. A fresh white bandage was wrapped around his shoulder, his broad chest bare beneath it.
I’d decided to take the wins we were given in that moment, cherishing the life still around me, but one person was missing.
“Tolek?” I’d asked, voice as small as could be.
“He’s the same,” Cyph had said, as he had every time I asked. Alive but the same.
But I wasn’t allowed to think about him now. I couldn’t lose myself to that pain when my attention was needed elsewhere.
Instead, I threw myself into reconstruction. Mystiques had rebuilt before. We’d do it again, and this time would be the last. I swore Kakias wouldn’t have another chance at destroying my people. Not now that I knew her deepest secrets.
But she hadn’t been the only surprise of Daminius, and now, it was time to deal with the traitor in our midst.
I swallowed, uncurling my fingers from the webbed curse on my arm.
“Ready?” I asked. My heart was heavy, but I forced away the ache in my chest, and didn’t allow my mind to wander to the infirmary upstairs.
“Yes,” Malakai answered.
