“Okay.”
One word. But it was enough to steady him. Enough to damn him.
Okay,Ronan told himself.
And just like that, the weight of his lies doubled.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Verena
COMING TO FELT DIFFERENT, almost as though my mind had returned inside the wrong vessel.
Something had shifted, stirred. Not quite in the world, but in me.
The Viper was still there, curled tight around my skull, its fangs dragging despair into every new breath.
The bond, sewn together between Ronan and I, pulsed with a new stability.
I knew what he had done the instant I heard his voice inside my head and that tether locked into place.
But this…this was something else entirely. Pulling, silently and limitless. It didn’t yearn for control because it didn’t need to. The dark pulse under my skin struck at it, but the new presence didn’t fight back.
Where the curse wanted to consume me, this force wanted tobecomeme. Whatever it was, it hadn’t saved me.
It was only just waking up.
Sunlight filtered through the caravan’s ceiling window, dust fluttering throughout the air.
After the chaos of Ronan, after everything, I was still trying to piece myself together when Elva and Nezra had reappeared,very quickly, after he left. They told me the pixies mentioned a caravan they had solely for tomes and novels, a library on wheels, and had offered it to us with one request:be mindful and leave every volume behind when we were done.
Elva and I had combed through countless books back in the Luamis library, desperate for answers, always finding nothing.
Obrann had seen to that. Ordering scribes to burn every book that so much as mentioned the war between the gods and hel. A kingdom rewriting its own past, erasing proof.
But there were always those who remembered the cost, who hid fragments in the dark, risking their lives to keep history alive. I thought a scribe would have hidden something in our archives, but if anyone held the outlawed truths without fear, it would be the pixies.
“Where did you learn to speak Verathi?” Nezra’s voice drifted from where she leaned against the sunken arm of a chaise, the fabric worn where her elbow rested.
My eyes burned from straining over the tomes, the script so small and dulled. I pinched the bridge of my nose, letting darkness settle behind my eyelids for a moment.
“Callum taught me when we were growing up. I didn’t learn much, could never quite get the hang of it. Just a handful of words, maybe a few phrases.” I paused, the thought settling too late. “How did you even know I could speak the ancient tongue?”
“You were mumbling when Ronan carried you back from the cliff. Not in Narith. InVerathi.And your magic,” her voice lowered. “It listens when you speak it?”
I hadn’t remembered that.What I’d heard from my own lips, echoing in the haze of pain, had sounded only like Narith, our native tongue. Not the god-language.
I sighed. “No need to whisper it in secret. The curse isn’t my magic. But yes, it listens.”
Contemplation stirred in Nezra’s eyes as she studied me. Finally, her lips moved up, a hint of something unreadable. “Interesting.”
Inessa huddled in a far corner, her cropped hair tucked behind her ears, her frame almost swallowed by the velvet of another chair.
Elva sat across from her in a twin seat, legs folded beneath her, both tracing reverent fingers down lines of ancient history.
My legs uncrossed as I moved toward the edge of my own cushions, placing the useless tome I had scoured last onto the wooden table. “Why?”
Inessa’s head snapped up, her eyes peering over the rim of her book. Elva nudged her shoulder, urging her silently to keep reading, though her own stare lingered a little too long on me.
