Not with her. Never with her. She was the only personkeeping me from falling. I’d clung to that wire stretched across the cavern for a very long time. I’d begun to believe I had no choice but to succumb to my father’s demands, to give in, to allow him to finish molding me into the person he needed me to be—an even worse extension of himself.
This woman had saved me.
If I could mold her into the person she needed to be, then she could save herself.
24
TEMPEST
“What happened to that man?” Brenna shrieked, her hands flailing around her face.
“Yes, what’s wrong with him?” Ivenrail’s gaze drilled Vexxion. “Do share with us.”
“Perhaps it was something he ate?” Vexxion said with that wry twist to his voice I adored, but tension boiled inside me. I could barely savor the sound of it now.
A man a few seats down who’d also chosen soup vomited it back up into his bowl.
I swallowed back the bile rumbling in my throat, my gaze flicking to Brodine standing near the wall. He continued to stare at the floor.
Others gagged, their hands slapping over their mouths to hold their dinners back. Soon, the room was going to fall into shambles.
“Stop it,” Brenna cried. “This is terrible!”
Yes. Yes, it was.
The vomiting was only a symptom of the larger disease plaguing this court. Vexxion was right when he said death shadowed Bledmire. Itwasinevitable.
These three hadn’t acted alone. Who was trying to kill me now?
Brenna screamed, barely sucking in a breath before releasing another.
“Stop it,” Ivenrail snapped her way. Her screams ended abruptly. I wasn’t sure if he used magic or if his will alone made it happen. Her face darkened, and she looked down at her plate, her hands flopping off the table and onto her lap.
I was the dispenser of death today even if I hadn’t dealt the final blows, and I wasn’t sure what to think of that or the gruesome satisfaction I’d found in watching the man across from me choke on his stew.
Kill or be killed. That was how I’d looked at the dregs. It was past time I started seeing those in Bledmire Court in the same light. Only a few might come out of this alive.
I sincerely hoped I’d be among them.
“Leave,” Ivenrail snapped Brenna’s way.
She nodded, and a servant rushed over to pull out her chair and help her stand.
Delaine jumped up as well, but when I started to rise, Ivenrail’s gaze pinned me in place. “Youwill remain seated, as will the other lady-in-waiting.” When his attention fell on Reyla, my heart turned into a solid block of ice.
“You don’t need either of them,” Vexxion drawled.
I didn’t look his way.
The vines squirmed beneath my skin, and it was all I could do not to claw at them. I wanted to dig and dig until I reached them, then rip them out and shred them.
“They weren’t involved in this,” Vexxion added.
One of Ivenrail’s slash-of-black-eyebrows lifted. “Weren’t they?”
After a panicked glance my way, Brenna left the room with Delaine.
“Leave, all of you,” Ivenrail bellowed. “I only want Vexxion, the pretty Nullen, and the blank one to remain.”
