AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I took a step back, as shocked as I would have been if she’d stabbed a blade into my chest. How could she believe the broken one surpassed me? I, who only entertained his existence because if I did not, he would have no one. He would break fully if I was gone, with nothing left at all. But he did not compare to me.
Nothing in her eyes hinted she understood that.
Shudders rolled through me, cold and strange. No. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
“Is that why he never told us about you?” she continued. “Why he told me to stay away? To run when you started to appear? Because he knew you couldn’t live among us without tearing everything apart?”
My body shook, every word like a knife chipping away at something in my chest. And it hurt. It hurt like death because this was all wrong. All broken, when it should have been fine now that I was the one in control. Now that the broken one was mostly asleep and she could see what I?—
“Give me Roan back,” she said. “Now.”
But she didn’t see.
She didn’t know.
I drew in on myself, cold horror making the world hurt too much to withstand.
The broken one had been right. We were not worthy of a treluria. Not in her eyes. The only woman we both wanted, the one we knew throughout our entire being was ours…
Didn’t want us.
The cold shivers grew worse. No, not us. That wasn’t it. She tolerated the broken one, even if she didn’t want him the way he wanted her. But he wasn’t the one she rejected. The one she looked upon with such disdain. I was, and that made the truth more than clear.
She was my treluria.
And she hated me.
23
CASIMIR
The creature disappeared into the sky with Princess Gwyneira, and I could do nothing to stop it.
I had not felt this much rage since the day my kingdom fell.
“What the fuck was that?” Clay spun, staring at his friends as if they would have an answer.
Ozias snarled as he shoved out of the charred debris where the creature had thrown him. Soot smeared the man from head to toe, lending him an even more wild air, as did the vicious fury in his eyes. He stalked toward the pathway leading from this odd communal garden space, only to retreat when the flames burning in the city street beyond proved too hot for him to continue.
At which point he began pacing along the perimeter of the houses like an animal in a cage seeking the slightest weakness to give him a way out.
It reminded me of my shadow wolves when they chafed at the need to remain in place for any length of time.
And that was only one of the many questions surrounding that man. I had not yet isolated the reason for why Ozias seemed so different from his companions, but I also had not missed how Ruhl reacted to him nor how something had shifted between Ozias and Gwyneira in the time they were gone.
Given what just happened a moment ago, it made me wonder if Roan wasn’t the only one hiding something.
But first things first.
“Stay here,” I said to Ruhl. The wolf’s body was more of a churning smoke cloud than any solid form at this point, moving fitfully in his frustration. At my words, his head emerged from the smoke, and he growled. His green eyes skipped down to the wound on my chest and then back to me.
Ruhl never spoke, though I could never fully suppress the flight of fancy that made me think he simply chose not to. Yet he still communicated quite clearly, and right now, it was obvious he did not want me changing form nor flying with this wound.
But needs must.
I shifted into my smoke and shadow, rising to follow the creature that had taken Gwyneira.
Or I tried to.
