The night chill hissed through the window bars as I gripped the bars to keep from smashing something.
She didn’t care.
That’s what hurt most, I suspected. Her utter disregard for all the lives she’d destroyed. I saw flutters of something more simmering beyond the facade, but what use were those shreds of remorse and fear when she tried to suffocate them?
“Congratulations,” I said through the shouts that vibrated around us.
“For?” she asked, not turning, voice raspy, but gleeful.
“Sowing the mayhem you so desperately wanted. You might just destroy Solkar’s Reach yet.”
She flicked a careless hand. “If you would have died when you were supposed to, none of this would have happened.”
I swallowed that bite of venom, already knowing it would poison me for longer than it had any right to.
“You had plenty of opportunities to kill me. Slip some poison in my tea,” I said.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I could have.”
“Why didn't you?” I asked, quieter than I meant to.
“Self preservation,” she said after a long pause I forced myself not to dissect.
“You’re in a more truthful mood,” I said.
Which meant she had an angle she wanted to exploit. I no longer believed.
She finally turned toward me, wearing that disturbing grin of hers. “Is it as freeing as you’ve always tried to convince me it was?”
“Yes.” Now I knew just who I was dealing with. “You hear them out there, don’t you?”
“Sounds better than that mushy chant you all insist on.” She slid herself toward me, knees to her chest, and eyes alight. She looked like she was waiting to hear her favorite bedtime story.
An act, yes, but I couldn’t help but see how lost she was among the lies drowning all the light in her.
None of them made any sense. She believed in an ungodly amalgamation of recited falsehoods and misplaced grandstanding, filled with cracks she was so eager to fill in with more leaps of logic, just to not watch it crumble.
She’d killed for this.
Probably would do it again.
Or maybe it was all another act. A vicious heart could be beating in that chest instead of a lost one.
Yet I still couldn’t reconcile this Nadya to the one who’d sipped tea in front of the fireplace with me and Geryll for so many nights, propping her feet up on the footstool so her socks–handknitted by Mrs. Thornbrew–would getnice and toastybefore bed.
“Why?” I shrugged. “Why do all of this?”
“I told you.” She rolled her eyes. “My loyalty was decided long before I met any of you.”
“Why didn’t it change?”
She had the gall to shrug. “I’ve had the same mission since I was born. Nothing could change that.”
The bars began to feel brittle under the strain of my anger. I flexed my palms away from them before I ripped them from the stone.
I didn’t want to scare her.
She could erase the last few years, but I couldn’t.
