“I’m sorry, Malakai,” Ophelia whispered. My heart might have stopped beating, I couldn’t be sure. Because Ophelia was the one person I was always sure of before I left, and now, I didn’t recognize her.
Before anyone could offer another excuse for their misplaced faith, I stormed from the room.
I hadn’t even decidedwhere I was headed, but my feetcarried me there.
The hallway stretched before me, shadows curling around sconces and statues, foreboding. My chest rose and fell as I stared at the door, darkness separating us.
For weeks I’d avoided this place—this entire section of the palace. Ophelia and the others had come here to search for anything my father may have hidden, but I couldn’t. It held too many ghosts I didn’t want to address.
But now, they’d sought me out.
Anger churned my blood, heating and warping until I was charging down the corridor, throwing the door wide.
Dull mystlight blinked to life when I entered, as if surprised. Like it knew when the inhabitant of this suite had died and pieces of its energy went with him. There were no reminders of me or my mother in my father’s former home. Not an artifact, not an image.
Shoving that disappointment aside, I strode for the office. It was locked, but I threw my shoulder against the wood—once, twice, three times, until the lock snapped, handle clattering to the floor.
It still smelled of his piney cologne. Exactly like the office he’d held in our home in Palerman.
Though carefully rifled through, the room remainedhis. Trinkets, papers, and books were thrown about lazily beneath dull mystlight, as if he’d spent many long hours slumped over the desk, working on whatever despicable plans he concocted. I hadn’t expected it to feel so…lived in. Holding his presence despite the weeks since he’d died.
Fuck, there were even bottles of liquor and sticky glasses lining the shelf beneath the window. Like he’d only left briefly and expected to come back. That, more than anything, was a punch to my gut. A stark snap to reality.
He’s not coming back.I breathed through the sentence and the roar of guilt it dragged through me.
But his son was here.
I stormed to the shelves and tore down every book I could reach.
The son he wanted more than me was here.
I swept the bottles of liquor from the table. Glass shattered, a mimic of my own world breaking. Shards crunched beneath my boots, filling the room with echoes of broken promises. Sharp cries of a father not protecting his son as he should.
Not wanting his son to exist.
The words on the papers covering his desk blurred before my eyes. It was his handwriting scribbled in cramped lines, his arrows and doodles. They spoke of Angels and tokens and prisons and things I could not give a single fuck about—not in his hand.
Each streak of dark ink ignited the anger inside me. Before I knew what I was doing, the papers were flying through the air. Shredding beneath my hands. Falling into the stains of dark liquor that seeped across the ground.
I collapsed to my knees with them.
It was unfair.
It wasso unfair.
I’d only wanted to follow in his footsteps. I’d only wanted to make him proud. I’d never known there was no chance.
Liquor seeped through the knees of my pants, glass digging into my skin.
At some point I started crying. I wiped my tears away angrily, at first, but the cascade quickly overwhelmed me, a curse I couldn’t outrun. It happened often these days. And no one—not my mother, not my friends, not even Ophelia—understood the torment constantly warring through my body. I was eternally alone.
I need to be alone. The solace of isolation was perhaps the only place I could be free.
Chapter Fifteen
Ophelia
It would bea two-day journey to the location in the Southern Pass, then possibly another day or night to locate the Engrossian camp and stake it out. I didn’t want to waste any more time lingering in Damenal when they already had two weeks on us.
