Roa frowned. The whole palace? That wasn’t possible. Rebekah had eyes everywhere. She would know if an entire palace’s worth of soldats and staff had left through the front gate in the middle of the night.
Unless they didn’t leave through the front gate...
“On the count of three,” Dax murmured, snapping Roa’s attention back to the danger at hand.
As one, they thrust. Roa’s opponent was twice her size but also twice as slow. She slashed and lunged, again and again. A heartbeat later, the man was disarmed and backed against the wall beneath the arcade, his eyes pleading, his hands raised in surrender.
Roa heard the thump of a body hit the earth behind her.
“I’ll finish him,” said Dax, stepping up to her side.
“You think I can’t?”
“No...” Dax said, taking the saber from her and giving the man a quick death. Roa watched the dark red blood streak down the plaster wall as his body slid to the ground. “... I just didn’t want you armed when I didthis.”
Raising both blades, Dax turned on her.
It was Roa whose back hit the wall now, two bloodied blades turned against her.
Dax’s thoughts were diamond clear on his face. He wasremembering the way she’d stepped into his room earlier tonight. The way she’d come into his bed.
He was seeing her wait for him to fall asleep, then pick up the key from the floor.
Seeing her unlock the gate.
I’ve ruined us,she thought.I’ve ruined everything.
Or maybe they were ruined long before now.
Maybe they were ruined the day her sister died in his place.
“A message arrived tonight,” he said, his voice low, “telling of a threatinsidethe palace.” He gripped both weapons properly now and held himself like an expert swordsman. “I prayed to every god it wasn’t you.”
Roa lifted her chin, even as her heart quailed.
“But the proof is right there, hanging around your throat.”
He was looking at her like she wasn’t the girl he’d made love to earlier. Like that girl no longer existed for him.
She doesn’t exist,Roa realized.I can never be that girl again after what I’ve done tonight.
Dax stepped closer. “Did you plan it all out with her? How to best seduce me?”
She could hear the sound of his broken heart in his words.
Roa knew what a broken heart felt like. She’d felt hers shatter into a million pieces the day Essie died.
She felt it shattering now.
Roa tried to harden herself against it.You’ve come this far. There’s only a little bit farther to go.
She thought of Essie locked in that cage. Essie fading away. Essie gone forever...
“What have you done with the girl I love?” Dax came closer.Their gazes locked. “I want her back.” He dropped one blade—Roa’s scythe—in the grass and gently touched her cheek. “Give her back to me.”
Roa wasn’t sure which was more dangerous: his steel or his touch or his words.
“That girl is gone,” Roa said, thinking of everything she’d done and still had yet to do. “Don’t waste your love on her.”
