I screamed, my heart hitting my feet as we plummeted. I lost my grip on Keir.
Sand poured over us, swallowing Keir’s shout. I scrambled for something to hold on to, but it was only sand and more sand, slipping through my fingers fast enough to burn.
The sky grew smaller and smaller, until it was a speck as we tumbled into the sinkhole. Sand blinded me, but I was falling so fast, I couldn’t move my arms to shield myself. Careening, feet over head—
My back slammed into something hard, my bones clanging together with the force of the impact. I gasped for breath, blinking hard as I tried to bring the world into focus.
Keir was beside me, on his stomach. With a groan, he rolled onto his back. He took a few seconds to catch his breath before he asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I panted. “You?”
“Fantastic,” he wheezed.
Walls of thick, dark sand stretched up to the dot of sky above us. Some grains still trickled down the sides as it settled, shifting noisily.
We were in a chasm.
Anger twisted my chest.
“You said you would save us!” I yelled uselessly up to the sky.
But there was no response. The jinn were long gone.
I dropped my head to the sand and squeezed my eyes shut. I’d thought I’d been so careful, but I had missed some loophole and doomed us all. For a second time. If the walls of sand collapsed on us, it would be less crushing than the hopelessness that pressed in on me now.
“Tell me your name again.”
I blinked my eyes open.
Keir kept his gaze resolutely on the sky so far above, refusing to look at me.
Throat tight, I ventured, “Samira.”
“Samira…” he repeated, trying it out. His tongue caressed the syllables in a low rumble. The first time I’d heard my name in weeks, and it was coated in so much pain and betrayal, my heart sank into my stomach. “Answer a question for me,Samira. Do your people hate us so much that it was easy to pretend to care for a tent full of refugees? To convince Velka you were friends? Were you laughing,Samira, when I told you about my time in the Shroud? How about when you got Rade to fuck you? Were you laughing then?”
Heat raced to my cheeks. “How did you—”
“Shifter hearing, remember? Don’t worry, I didn’t listen to the whole thing.” When he finally looked at me, the yellow of his eyes blazed with fury. And something more that had his chest heaving and his brows dropping low.
“I didn’t—I mean,wedidn’t—” I cut myself off. Not the important part. “No, I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t pretending—”
“You went through thewhole fucking wedding ceremony!” he almost shouted, half sitting up. “You tricked us all into thinking you were kind, that you gave a single fuck about us. You mademethink—” Keir blew out a laugh that was nothing more than a whip of hot air and dropped his head back to the sand. “Your queen gave you an order and you obeyed. Fine. But you had a month, Samira—if that’s even really your name. Should we try a few more? See which identity you prefer? I hear Leila is a popular name in Ashorah. How about that one?”
My eyes burned. “My name really is Samira.”
“I gave you so many fucking chances,Samira.” I cringed. He threw my name at me like it was a curse. “Over and over, I begged you for the truth. None of this had to happen. You could have stopped it.”
“I wanted to tell you,” I whispered. “But then my runes were green, and Rade said he’d seen me in his fortune, and at the Lunar Feast, you…” A lump formed in my throat; I swallowed past it. “I thought I was doing the right thing. And then, I… For sixteen years, I mattered to no one, and then suddenly, I mattered toeveryone. It was… addictive.” It sounded so selfish when I said it out loud. No, I’d known it was selfish before. Despite all the excuses I’d made for myself, I’d known, and yet I’d done it anyway. The guilt was suffocating.
After a beat of silence, Keir asked, “Rade saw you in his fortune?”
I nodded.
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. He only told me he’d seen me.”
A long breath streamed from his nose as he considered that. He turned his face up to the sky again, eyes flicking back and forth as he processed how much of the past month had been a lie.
