Why can nothing ever go right?
How is anyone supposed to fix this?
My eyes burn, and my head falls back. “If I asked you to kill me, would you do it?”
“The fuck?” Jasper demands.
“In a heartbeat,” Pierce answers at the same time.
I wasn’t talking to either of them.
Dakari’s black glower turns deadly. “You asshole.”
“Yeah. I get it. I’m just another selfish Ó Rinn bastard. Spare me the lecture. Would you do it?”
He can’t answer me.
I’ll take that as a maybe. At least I have a last resort, even if I suspect he’d make it hurt.
“Kyrith’s already working on it. Give her a week.” Jasper even sounds sympathetic.
A week? He thinks this can be solved in a week?
“I might not have that long.”
“And you think Mathias will sort this for you?” Pierce gestures at the runeform that covers my entire upper body. “You think he knows more than she does?”
“Your sister swore he was good.”
He’s my only chance now.
My eyes trace the circles and lines. Maybe it’s my pessimism talking, but I swear I’ve never seen a runeform thiscomplex. It’s just one. No obvious degeneration, unlike the last, but it covers so much of my skin. In places the lines and rings are so thick that it’s almost impossible to make out the patterns at all.
And it’s glowing like a small sun. No number of thick jumpers is going to hide this.
I’ll need to waste time on perfecting an illusion to do the job.
“My sister is a born liar,” Pierce reminds me. “Everything that comes out of her mouth is suspect. You can’t trust her.”
“I don’t have any other options!” I snarl back, snatching up my shirt and ignoring the wobble in my knees as I head towards a wall at random. “Now, I’m no longer welcome, so I’d like to leave.”
I spit the last, and in answer a black door springs into being on my left.
“You’re going to go without talking to Lambert?” Jasper prods. “He’s recovering well from his injuries, but he still can’t figure out why you never told him you were his brother.”
My knuckles hesitate an inch from the wood.
“Why do you care?”
“Because you’re breaking our girl’s heart,” Dakari grumbles. “And fucking over the one person who never gave a shit about your curse.”
“And being a complete dick in the process,” Jasper adds.
Do they really think I want to do any of those things? If I had Kyrith’s heart—which thankfully I don’t, given how easily she tossed me out of here—why would I ever want to break it?
No. If Kyrith loved me, I’d be the luckiest man alive. I’d do anything to keep her. Even murder.
My observations of Dakari tell me he thinks the same.
