Page 159 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

But I crushed that too.

Guilt was a future problem.

It felt like I was moving through deep water in the dark. The assassin’s pain was simply information—useful insofar as I could measure it against his resistance. His defiance, nothing more than an obstacle. I had only one focus.

Distantly, I was aware I was choosing not to care.

“Why her?” My voice seemed alien to my own ears, lacking any rise or fall in its tone.

The assassin didn’t answer. So I asked again. And again.

Lost in a fugue state, I attacked him again. This time, I saw myself wrap my hands around his uninjured biceps and forearm. Knew I was doing the math so that I could angle the force so the bone would give but not break through the skin. Watched as I wrenched my hands in opposing directions.

Reina didn’t protest or command me to stand down. I felt her watching. The Nocthel in her understood that when someone threatened family, there was no line left to cross.

But I distantly registered Camrick saying my name. “Owain.”

The sound dragged at something buried under the violence, but not enough.

This hired killer had decided she was my weakest point because he’d seen me carry her from the room. He was right and wrong.

She was the only reason I was still letting him breathe.

“Owain.” Camrick’s voice again. This time it came out in something more effective than a warning. It was the same voice he’d used as a teenager when we were broken young men, and he was talking me down from the edge.

The sound was a reminder of who I was supposed to be. Of who I chose every day not to be.

Back then, I’d been stuck in my room most of the time, only let out for official functions, because my magic was so unstable. But that wasn’t the only reason. Reina feared that if the Assembly knew the true extent of what I could do, they’d do more than insist on taking me away.

Camrick, who had survived the Assembly's fortress in Caervorn the same way I'd survived my own cage—by choosing, every single day, to still be himself on the other side of it. The training the mages put him through as an elemental savant was brutal. He hated every day he had to study under those hypocrites.

Even while he suffered, he sat with a broken, volatile, teenaged me and said I believe in you when no one else dared get close enough. So I listened when the message below the sound said, I see you. I’m still here. Come back to me.

“Tell me,” I said softly, stepping away from the edge of madness I’d been treading, “did they show you proof your wife or daughter was untouched?”

The assassin’s eyes flickered. That was all I needed.

“No,” I murmured. “Just promises.” I leaned closer. “Then you’ve already condemned her.”

The words landed harder than anything I’d done to his body. His breath hitched from something that had nothing to do with his broken bones and everything to do with imagination.

I let the shadows settle, just enough that he could think.

“They won’t wait long,” I said quietly. “Those bastards upstairs have probably already sent a message.”

His pulse stuttered.

I saw the moment the would-be assassin regretted resisting. Saw him try to collect himself like one does after a stumble in public. But the stumble had happened. We both knew it.

“Your healer became the primary target,” he said, his voice rough at the edges from pain. “Finding out about her made them speed up the plan for the king.”

“Yet you didn’t touch her.”

“I don’t hurt women!”

That single sentence would have me granting him a swift death instead of a painful one.

He stopped to breathe and seemed to be considering how much to say. “The device doesn’t destroy magic.”