But it was her name on his lips that hurt the worst. There was familiarity there, and it did not hurt so much as it made me yearn. I wanted that connection to her. Because even though she might hate it—and I suspected she did, from how she’d hidden it from me—it was not broken. The Lifebind was still intact, but the tentative trust Koryn and I had built? I had shattered it.
“Koryn and I, we are…” I began but could not finish. There were too many words and too much broken. Only one was still incontrovertibly true. “We are bonded.”
The Dark God raked his gaze over me, his expression vaguely amused. Did he find me lacking? Too bad.
He met my gaze for the first time. “You are not the only one bonded to the witch,” he said.
But that did not make us partners. “We are bonded to her. Not to each other.”
The Dark God’s blue-black eyes sparkled. The slash of a smile on his face turned vicious. “You flatter yourself, halfling.”
Something dark and fragmented thrashed inside me, in a part of my soul that I had kept even from Koryn. “Go to the?—”
“The Dark God’s frozen hell?” He laughed again. “The darkness and I are already well acquainted.”
He turned his back fully on the palace and the icy sea.
“Call if you need me,” he said over his shoulder, even as his extremities began to disintegrate into wisps of black.
And what did calling the Dark God entail? But instead, I said, “And will you answer?”
He spun at the last second, meeting my eyes with brutal intensity.
“For Koryn?” The Dark God inclined his chin. “Always.”
CHAPTER 3
KORYN
I was in Balar Shan.There was nowhere else in all of Velora that boasted such extravagance.
The bathhouse where I was imprisoned had more than a dozen pools so deep that when I peered over the edge, my head spun with vertigo. Each was edged with gold-inlaid tile in intricate decorative patterns, each unique, representing hours of effort to render. But for all that beauty, it was empty—and not because of me. The windows high overhead were in various states of disrepair: some cracked, others shattered, none boarded up against the seeping cold. There were puddles of water—a leaking roof—but the baths themselves were empty, debris strewn across their tiled bottoms.
This place of opulent beauty had been abandoned. Maybe the fae had suffered from the curse more than I realized. Or maybe they were as flippant and self-serving as I’d always imagined, and they’d abandoned the bathhouse when it no longer appeased their whims.
The Lifebind glared at me from the inside of my wrist, the dark blue ink solid even as the world around me wobbled. Whatever they’d given me, spell or herb, the effects were wearing off enough for me to think lucidly, but my movementswere still jerky, and my perception of the physical space wavered. The blood-laced ring of salt was surely not helping.
My eyes lingered on the symbols of my tattoo, even as my throat closed around a flood of unwelcome emotion. A long line that branched out into three at the end, the symbol appeared twice, inverted and mirrored. Straight and true. The irony clogged my throat. I gasped for my next breath.
The force of Garrick’s betrayal hit harder now than it had in the foggy gorge in the minutes after the Memory Gate.
I grabbed for my throat, as if I could claw away the feelings that made it impossible to breathe. The water on the ground rippled around me, stirred by spells or toxins or my own frantic movements.
The drip from earlier had faded into the distance, but in that moment it intensified, my accentuated senses amplifying the sound until each droplet was as loud as a symphony. Or a scream.
Breathe, I begged my lungs. The techniques that Tomin had taught me for wrangling my overwrought senses deserted me. I closed my eyes again, desperate to block out anything I could. I curled my legs against my chest, wrapping my arms around my shins, rocking back and forth. I had to control it. I had to control the input, or it would drive me mad.
My hands found one another, one gripping the other tight. Memory flashed through me, kindled by the sensation—Garrick’s strong fingers closing around mine at the Sacrifice Gate. I squeezed harder.
Slowly, so slowly, the flood of sensations receded as I anchored myself in the sensation of one hand grasping the other. I focused on my breathing, on forcing the air in and out of my lungs, and not on the fact that the thing that calmed me was a memory of Garrick. That it was the warmth and comfort and lo?—
Love.
What use was there in lying to myself any longer? What else did I have to lose?
The word had been on the tip of my tongue, living in my veins, seeping into the world with my every exhale. I’d fallen in love with Garrick the Red, notorious bounty hunter, secret half-fae, my bonded. A man who was kind and strong at the same time. I’d fallen in love with a lie.
That love is as dead as I am.And Garrick was the one who’d murdered it.
