“I’m not saying I want an assassin to take their shot, but if it’s going to happen, this way no one gets hurt.”
“No one? What about you?”
“Well, no one I care about.”
Magdala pressed her fists against her eyes. “What do I have to do, Ash, to convince you that this self-deprecating attitude is a pack of dragon skat!”
He almost smiled, but fought it down.
“Is that why you changed the policy?” she demanded. “Some kind of passive suicide?”
“I had to do that. I had to because Valenna told me …”
“I knew it!” She strode toward him, holding up an accusatory finger. “She manipulated you.”
“She thinks my brother is alive.”
“That’s insane.”
“She thinks he might be in Ashkendor, a prisoner or worse. She worries that if the war doesn’t end soon, we’ll lose him again. Forever.”
Magdala shook her head, her throat tight. “No. No, that’s crazy.” But she remembered what Zephyr had said about Marwenna, Evander’s mother, who could revive the dead. What if Valenna was right?
“Either way, I want the war that took him from me to end,” Asherton said. “And I want him back, either alive or I want his body out of Ashkendor. This is the only way.”
“But Ash … you hardly knew him.”
“He was one of the only people who has ever loved me …”
“That’s not true!” she shouted. “What about Zephyr? What about me?”
Asherton let out a tremulous laugh. “You don’t love me, Mags. You said yourself that you were just lonely and excited, and you lost control.”
“Maybe I lied!” she cried, her desperation mounting. “You should know me well enough by now to know when I’m lying!”
“Didyou lie?”
“It doesn’t matter either way. You’re not made important because people love you or unimportant because people hate you. You matter because you’re a human being with a soul, and you don’t need another reason to live.”
“But I want you to live,” he said quietly. “And I know what will happen if someone takes a shot at me or slashes a knife at me.”
“What will happen, Ash?”
“You’ll step into the breach. And I’ll lose you. I will not risk losing you.”
“Then why did you do this? Why change the policy?”
“Because I don’t want to lose Vander either.”
She understood. She was hurt and frustrated and so angry she wanted to boil over like a kettle, but she knew what it was to love and to hold onto the person you love until your fingers lock and you cannot let go. A love like that spurs you to a kind of madness, until you’re standing on a dock under the moon, tossing your whole life into a bonfire you lit yourself.
“I will not lose you,” he said again.
She held up her hand, threatening, her eyes dark with fury. “If you go down, we go down together. Shotfires blazing, knives in our hands. If our blood spills, it mingles. Understand?”
He hesitated. “I’ve painted a target on my chest today. They’ll come for me soon.”
She grabbed his hands and squeezed until his fingers were white. “Then we face them together. We take them down with us, and then we go down, like one.”
