Rowenna holds out her arm as if inspecting a bracelet, and I want to shake her, shout at her for being just as reckless and arrogant. She needs to run and maintain her slight lead. Even then, it likely won’t be enough. Alaric could level the wall with a snap of his fingers or snatch the earth out from beneath Rowenna’s feet. This couldn’t have been her entire escape plan.
“Embedding the stones in your own skin won’t work,” Alaric says through gritted teeth. “You’re not a descendant of Callahan. The stones won’t give you our power.”
“I’d like to test that theory myself,” Rowenna says as she swings her other leg over the wall and drops to the ground.
“Give me the gemstones, Rowenna!” Alaric roars after her. “If you cooperate, I’ll convince my father to be merciful. Perhaps we can renegotiate the terms of the treaty.”
“Except you no longer have anything to negotiate with,” she calls back over her shoulder as she bounds down the moonlit path.
Alaric lets out an exasperated growl and raises both hands. A door-sized hole blasts through the city wall, and he shouts my sister’s name again as he storms through the wreckage. “You know you can’t outrun me. It’s like trying to outrun the mountain itself!”
Rowenna glances back, finally looking properly scared.
She should be. I don’t know how she ever thought this would work.She’s smarter than this, more cunning than this.
With a wave of his hand, Alaric rips the frozen path out from beneath Rowenna’s feet. She hits the ground with a painful grunt, looking from her bloody palms to Alaric. He strikes again before she can regroup, chipping away at the rock beneath her, forcing her closer and closer to the edge of the mountain until there’s nowhere left to go.
Except down.
Ro doesn’t beg or sob. She stares defiantly at Alaric. “Do it,” she dares him. “It might be my end, but it will be yours as well. Mark my words.”
Alaric leans forward, his face a hair’s breadth from Rowenna’s when he whispers, “Your words will never be marked. They’ll be forgotten.”
Then he clenches his fist, and the ledge Ro’s standing on breaks away.
I scream and Rowenna does too—a horrible, discordant harmony. She claws the air, grasping for solid ground, and against all odds, her fingers snag on the chain of Alaric’s waistcoat—the same obsidian-studded chain I hold in my hands now.
Ro stares at it hopefully, as if it might somehow save her.
But then the chain snaps, and my sister falls.
And all my hopes for the future plummet with her.
Forty
I hurl the chain across the room and melt to the dirty floor of Delphine’s home, crying so hard I can’t breathe.
“What wasthat?” I gasp out, even though I know the answer. There’s only one thing it can be.
The memory.
The truth I’ve been searching for since I arrived in Vanzador.
Except everything about it iswrong.
Or maybeI’vebeen wrong all this time, and my initial fears and suspicions were right.
No.
There has to be another explanation. One that doesn’t involve Alaric lying to my face from the second I arrived on the mountain. One that doesn’t involve me falling in love with Rowenna’s murderer. He never would have killed someone the same way his father killed Besnik. It would have destroyed him.
Delphine stumbles across the room and collapses at my side, tears spilling down her cheeks as she wraps me in a hug. “I’m so sorry, Indira. I hate that you had to see that. And that Alaric isn’t who we thought he was. He fooled us all.”
“Maybe it isn’t true.” I mean to say it with conviction, but my voice pitches up into a question, and Delphine’s looking at me with so much pity, I have to squeeze my eyes shut.
I sink into the blackness of my mind, trying to calm my breathing as I sift through every interaction I’ve ever had with Alaric Alaverdi—from our wedding on the Tomb Flats to our fights in the solarium, from our visits to the mines to defending each other in the queen’s salon, from our secret stolen moments in my bedchamber to dancing in his arms at our coronation—desperate for some sort of proof that it was real.
Ithadto be real.
