This path had been designed by the chaos goddess? Wasn’t her goal to win the game? To win on Eris’s behalf, I should have to sit on the throne, and Themis’s Champion would be defeated. That was a little hard to do when she had cursed me such that Themis’s Champion was the source of my power.
If her goal was to win the game, she had a funny way of helping.
Waswinning her goal? Eris had only interfered when she’d been provoked, when Hart had challenged her directly. Themis had interfered at every turn to ensure Hart succeeded. She’d tried to have me killed through Vaddon on multiple occasions. She’d just tried again. My gut said that Eris didn’t care about winning.
“Tell us the path,” Hart said through gritted teeth.
“You’ve already found it.”Scarlett gestured with her snout again to the necklace.
“The gem flashed when I yelled at Hart,” I said. It felt like Scarlett played with us, and I wanted it to end. If my suspicions were correct, I’d rather just know. “It glowed when Hart did the same. We didn’t touch each other to power the gem. In our current predicament, that should be impossible.”
Scarlett nodded.
“So what changed?”
Hart raised his brow. I didn’t know if he sensed my anger rising again, or if he, too, had figured out the missing piece and wanted confirmation.
“You tell us, Champion. What did you do to make the red light appear?”
“I said horrible things.” The weight of Hart’s stare was heavy, but I couldn’t look at him.
“True things,” he added. “You’ve swallowed all your anger since we left Kavios—refused to tell me what you actually thought. This was the first time since…” He swallowed with no small amount of discomfort. “The first time we’ve been honest with each other in a long time.”
My anger flared again as I realized what he’d been about to say. This was the first time since we were together. This was the first time since everything had broken between us—since he had broken it.
A smirk crossed his face, and I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what he was happy about.
“Why does that bring you joy? We were awful to each other.”
“Because you were angry.” He gestured to the red glow again. “And I guess so was I.”
He moved closer, his fingers skimming the necklace where it rested on my chest, and I finally glanced up to meet his gaze.
“I’ve seen every time you wanted to yell at me, every time you wanted to snap, every time you wanted to”—he swallowed again—“do something that showed an emotion. You’ve been shoving them all away.”
How could he possibly know that? This was the conundrum that was Hart. He seemed so cavalier at times, with that stupid smirk, but then he’d have these moments where he showed how carefully he paid attention. He saw me, even when I preferred he didn’t.
“You’ve seen—no, you’ve taken just about enough of my emotions,” I said.
“Ember—”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear it.
“There should be no question if one of you has taken from the other. You would know,”Scarlett interrupted.
“How?” Regretfully, I thought of the night we spent in each other’s arms. Nothing between us. It was his biggest betrayal in all of this. Not only had Hart kept his true identity from me—he’d used me.
Hart sighed. “You can feel when you take from me, right? When we’ve healed Charon?”
I nodded.
“You would feel the same if I took from you. I won’t deny you’ve felt it before, but it wasn’t when you think it was.”
My mind returned to our night tangled together in his room above Forest’s Edge. I had felt … a lot. And as much as my mind tried to rush away from the scene, from the memory of what we were to each other—what we could have been—I considered his words. My skin had been alight with our connection, with that heat that always danced between us. It was not the same feeling as when I took emotion from him to fuel magic.
That didn’t mean anything.
I searched my memories of our interactions since our first meeting. Unfortunately, they were too easy to call to mind. “You tried to grab me in the crowd, to stop me from getting stuck with the Feared.”
