I grit my teeth so hard they ache.
He’s right, of course. But I have a duty. If I led with my heart, I would never have survived The Vein.
The dunes.
I would not have become High Mistress.
Out there, everything’s a weapon if you’re desperate enough. I wonder if Orlaith is beginning to realize that, too. I can’t wrap my head around a reality where she’d let Cainon bite her unless she had a very good reason.
But I can’t dwell on that right now.
“I have to make the right decision for my people,” I say, my voice a knuckle-bearing blow.
Baze clicks his tongue, then pushes off the door and leans back, crossing his arms over his chest as he dips his head to the side.
The look he gives me is a shiv through the ribs.
“Perhaps that’s what you’ve been doing all along. Perhapsthat’sthe real reason you didn’t tell me she was listening outside the office that day when Cainon proposed their coupling.”
The words land like a blow to the jaw, and I suddenly wish he was drunk.
“You don’t mean that …”
He sniffs, turns, and picks his sword up off the end of my bed. “I’ll do as you’veordered,”he says, voice spiked with enough venom to stop a heart. “But if anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive you. Or myself.”
He shoves the box against my chest, pulls the door open, then leaves me choking on the smell of smoke, sex, and rage.
Steps heavy, I weave up the jagged stairway carved into the lofty tower of crystal, cresting a rise that releases me onto a small plateau—like someone scooped out some stone and made a sheltered inlet.
A diving platform.
I look out upon the ocean that’s a stretch of glass bathed in the same soft peach as the sky. It would almost be impossible to pinpoint the horizon if it weren’t for the icebergs scattered across the still.
I look down the cliff to the ocean far below—a jump I’ve made many times.
Before.
Now the prospect feels a bit like leaping into a gaping, monstrous maw ready to crunch down on me, slurp the meat off my bones, then spit them out on the shore. The beast that roams these waters does not discriminate between what she does and does not eat.
Destroy.
Is she down there now? Looking up at me? Waiting for me to jump so she canpounce?
Crouching, I run my hands through my hair, tugging at the roots as Orlaith’s admissiontap-tap-tapsat me.
I miss you.
I miss you.
I miss you.
The sawtooth edges of those three words shred my heart straight down the middle.
If something happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.
She needs to be here—with her people.
She needs to come home.
