To save myself.
The thief who could be selfless.
I rolled onto my side and stared into the fire. Forcing out a breath, I dragged my hands down my face. My fingers trembled. We were alive, but my body wasn’t convinced it had won. My arms ached, marked with burning scratches from the cage of trees, and a dull throb crawled up my leg from when I’d hit the ground. There’d be an ugly bruise there tomorrow.
Sleep wasn't at my fingertips, but at least Cass’s healing salve was. I reached for my pack but came up empty. The jar must be in Gavin’s. Careful not to wake him, I eased his pack onto my lap.Clothes, food, rope—there. A jar.But my fingers brushed against something else alongside it. Frowning, I pulled a worn journal free and flipped open the leather cover.
Messy scrawl covered the first page. But it wasn’t Gavin’s. It was Reid's. A pang of grief twisted inside me as I traced my fingers over the ink. The edges of the page were worn as if it had been touched a hundred times before. I could almost see Reid hunched over it, brows furrowed behind his spectacles, sketching and scribbling late into the night.
Why had Gavin brought this?
He'd been reluctant to tell me the full story of Reid's death back in the fields. But it hadn’t felt like a secret meant to hurt me, more like one meant to shield me from pain. Maybe even some of his own.
Gavin had been there when Reid died. The guilt of not being able to stop it must be all-consuming.
I skimmed through the pages, my breath catching on a familiar sketch. It was the one of us standing together on a mountain peak. Reid must have redrawn it from memory since the original had been ruined that night in the hot spring.
In the drawing, Gavin's arm was slung over my shoulder, his head tilted toward mine, whispering something that had made me laugh. Everyone else was staring at the vast, breathtaking vista spread out below.
But not us.
Even with the whole world laid out before us, we had only been looking at each other. Reid had captured it perfectly. Not staged, not posed. Just the way we were.
I had loved this drawing because it felt real. Now, it felt like something else entirely. A truth, captured in ink.
I turned the pages, smiling faintly at more of Reid’s sketches, ones he must have drawn after that last hunt.
But his journal entries seemed to grow darker. His writing spilled across the page in a frantic scrawl. He had always been obsessed with uncovering the truth behind myths and magic. And my hand stilled as I flipped a page and found a new sketch.
Reid had drawn a pearl-encrusted hair comb, with amethyst gemstones and a scalloped shell. Next to it, he had written a single name:Tivara.
And beneath that, a damning sentence:Why Marin?
The air tightened in my chest. There was no way Reid could have known the witch’s true name or her connection to me. Not even Gavin had known. He'd been sure her name started with an E. I hadn’t learned it until after Tivara imprisoned me.
Unless Reid had spoken with her.
Had made a deal.
The realization sliced through me. This was the proof it had never been Gavin.
The warmth from the fire couldn’t reach the ice pooling in my veins. The witch had claimed she’d enlisted a friend to give me the comb.
A friend.
She'd never called him by name. I had foolishly assumed it was Gavin because she'd offered the answers he was seeking, and I thought she meant the compass.
But Reid had been seeking answers too, a story that would set him apart—bring him fame. And he'd lost a year's worth of research in the hot spring. All his journal entries gone, along with the dreams of publishing his work. The witch could have given him what he needed to achieve his ambitions.
And she did.
I flipped the page, finding notes on drowned cities, secrets of the merfolk, and things only the sea witch would know.
I hung my head. I hadn’t trusted Gavin at all, presuming the worst because it fit the witch’s lies, and my fear that Gavin was just like all the others, and he'd break my heart.
He'd tried to claim his innocence, but I hadn’t believed him. It wasn’t until I saw the library he built that I even considered I might be wrong.
And I had been wrong, painfully, blindingly wrong.
