Alina met Maven’s gaze head-on, refusing to look away. “If you want me gone, just say it,” she said. “But don’t call me a traitor without evidence.”
Maven’s mouth twitched. “Well, gone would be preferable, Princess. But watched will do.”
Kael stood close enough that their shoulders brushed together, a small comfort against Maven’s accusing glare. “We move at midnight. No one leaves the circle without my say. After the job, we’ll settle this for good.” He glared around, daring anyone to argue. No one did. Not out loud, at least.
Seraphina tucked the marked cloth into her belt. “We’ll double watches. If anyone so much as farts in the wrong direction, I’ll know about it.”
The meeting dissolved and any sense of unity with it, replaced by a dozen small knots of suspicion. Even Marcus, who usually played peacemaker, avoided Alina’s eyes as he drifted away with Finn. Tamsin lingered for a second, then vanished, silent as breath.
Kael and Alina were left alone at the fire’s edge, the wood hissing as it burned low. The circle of warmth and light shrank, and neither of them seemed inclined to move away from it, or each other. The rest of the rebels had drifted to their tents or to the odds-and-ends of their night-watch duties, leaving a brittle silence that was, in its own way, more suffocating than the earlier confrontation. Alina found herself shivering, unsure if it was the cool air or the knowledge that everyone in this camp wanted her gone, or worse, watched.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said, voice sharp and small, not daring to meet Kael’s eyes. She sat down and hugged her knees to her chest, trying to make herself less of a target.
He hesitated just long enough for her to wonder if he would answer at all before eventually saying, “I did.” His jacket was suddenly draped over her shoulders. He sat down next to her, close enough that their shoulders touched again, lingering this time. “It was the truth. If they can’t accept it, that’s on them.”
Alina didn’t know if she should be grateful or furious. Mostly, though, she was tired of having to be defended. “They’ll never trust me. Not after this,” she said, and the words tasted like iron in her mouth. “I don’t even blame them.”
He reached over, placing a steadying hand on her arm. It was a gesture that should have felt comforting, but it only made her ache more. “I’m asking you to trust me,” he said. “Just get through tomorrow. That’s all that matters right now.”
Alina nodded, but the gesture was automatic, meaningless as a prayer recited to an empty room. She focused on the sound of the fire, on the way the flames licked at the bones of the wood, consuming with an appetite she recognized from inside her own chest. She could feel the stares from across the clearing, the way Maven’s eyes bored into her back even through the shield of Kael’s jacket. Pressure hung heavy in the air, a storm waiting to break and sweep her away.
Kael squeezed her hand, just once, and let go. “You should try to sleep.”
Alina almost laughed. “You think I’ll be able to?” Her voice cracked, a break in her practiced calm.
He offered a crooked, apologetic smile. “No. But you can pretend.”
The pretense was a comfort, in its way. She’d spent her entire life pretending—pretending to not notice the way her mother judged her when she walked into the room, pretending to be grateful for the tutors and the guards and the gilded cage her father called love. Pretending to not care that the world outside the palace had been forbidden to her, that the only thing allowed to grow in her was hunger for more.
They sat together in silence, watching the fire shrink to a smolder. The night grew colder, and still neither of them moved. Kael seemed unwilling to leave her, as if he feared she might dissolve into smoke the moment she was alone. Alina found herself grateful for the company, even though the darkness between them was thick with the things they left unsaid.
Around the edge of the clearing, the other rebels clustered in small, muttering knots. Marcus and Finn hunched over a game of dice, their faces drawn and grave in the half-light. Even Tamsin, the silent shadow who’d always seemed above the pettiness of rebel politics, now eyed her with open suspicion.
It was Maven, though, who worried her most. He stood at the far edge of the camp, hands clasped behind his back, watching her with a speculative gleam that made her skin crawl. It was the look of a predator who’d already decided how the story would end.
She wondered, for the hundredth time, what her father would think if he could see her now. Would he recognize her in this hard-edged, desperate creature hunched by a rebel fire?
Would he even want to?
The guilt stung, and she hated herself for feeling it. Her father had lied to her, locked her away, and made her a symbol for everything that was wrong with the kingdom. But still, she could not bring herself to hate him fully. There was always that sliver ofhope that something in him could be redeemed, that maybe if she survived this, if she found a way to change things, he would see her as more than a pawn.
The camp settled into an uneasy quiet. Alina watched Finn wander across the shadows, hands in his pockets, whistling a tune she didn’t recognize. He caught her eye and offered a quick, sympathetic nod, then kept moving—always moving, never quite part of anywhere.
Kael exhaled, long and low, as if letting out everything he’d been holding inside. “You know,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, “it’s not always like this. The suspicion. The fear.”
Alina almost believed him. “In a way, it’s all I’ve ever known.”
He looked at her then, and she saw something raw in his expression. “That’s why you stayed, isn’t it? To learn what it’s like to be part of something, instead of apart from it?”
She thought about the question, about how close it came to the truth. “I wanted to matter,” she said eventually. “That’s all.”
He nodded. “You do. Even now, when they hate you for it.”
A silence grew between them, deep enough to fall into. Alina wanted to fill it, maybe even goad him into an argument, but she didn’t have the energy. She let the silence stand, a monument to all the words she’d never learned to say.
She watched the fire burn itself out, ember by ember, and wondered if that was how she would end: as a faint glow, soon to be forgotten.
15
