“Look. Away.”
His words rattle with steely command, but I lift my chin and squeeze that cold, trembling hand. Looking down, I give Mishka all of me, leaving nothing but scraps for the man with the blade.
Her eyes are dancing, breaths distorted.
“Tell me about him,” I whisper, grabbing her other hand and resting them both atop her abdomen, trying to ignore the warm, putrid liquid now leaching through Rhordyn’s jacket. “Tell me about the man who gifted you his cupla.”
Rhordyn’s regard is a brand on my face.
I know what’s coming, but I refuse to look away. To hide behind a line that’s only fortified in my imagination. He wanted me to train—to learn to wield a sword and dodge a deadly blow—but he can’t shield me from everything.
He can’t shield me fromthis.
“V-Vale,” she rasps, cheeks swelling with the beginnings of a smile. “His eyes are like the s-sea. I knew I was his the m-moment I looked into them.”
My lower lip wobbles, so I tuck it between my teeth. “I love that ...”
A soft nod.
“I d-dreamt our baby has his eyes,” she whispers, each word landing a chisel to my chest.
I wonder if she knows. How much of her is painfully aware of what she’s lost.
“A little girl ...” her gaze shifts, landing somewhere faraway as her chest rattles with another inhale. “But we’ll see.”
My next breath slices me up, poisoning me with the residue of her scarcely veiled pain.
I hope she’s seeing that dream. That she’s blissfully unaware of how shredded that part of her body is. That she believes she’s holding her mother’s comforting hands, and not those of a stranger.
A cough has her buckling in my lap, perfuming the air with more of that putrid smell.
I hold her tighter.
“You’ll see,” I lie, blooming a smile so hollow it hurts. “You’ll see her soon.”
Mishka’s lips part, but then her body jerks and—
Something warm leaks onto my thighs as her eyes widen, then gutter, and I hear the stark hiss of a withdrawing blade.
My heart stumbles a beat.
I don’t want to look, but my eyes drift of their own accord, halting on the spill of blood pushing through a clean slice on the left side of her chest ...
“You—” I sever my sight of the wound that’s scoring me in a way that feels permanent. “You just—”
Rhordyn wipes his dagger on the grass. “Stopped her suffering,” he spits, as if the words were spikes in his tongue.
Our stares collide, and though he doesn’t reply, his cold, detached eyes say everything.
Not the first ...
Probably not the last.
My throat clogs, every breath feeling like a step in a ladder I don’t want to ascend.
Thisis what I’ve been hiding from; what Rhordyn’s been facing whenever he leaves the castle grounds.
No wonder he sits on that throne wearing dead eyes.
