I want to be sodden and salty, stretched out on the black-stone beach, the sun on my face as Kai churns through the waves—always watching.
Always close.
“Shunned in death!”
I want to be in Rhordyn’s Den, curled beneath the covers and surrounded by walls of black, sleeping away the day.
Hiding from the world.
Cainon steps behind me, and I can feel the frantic pace of his pounding heart, his hard, throbbing manhood pressed against me.
He’s …enjoyingthis.
“He needs tosuffer,” Cainon grates out, his voice carved with a menacing lilt.
“Shunned in death!”
I can’t think, can’t speak, can hardly breathe as I scan the wild crowd, some with an upside-down v carved into their foreheads.
Their fists punch the sky every time they bellow the vile words.
I catch sight of a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and bold blue eyes that spear right through me, and my cheeks heat with a flare of shame. I break Gun’s stare, looking down at Zane tucked close to his side, draped in the cloak I bought him. Watching me with wide eyes, like he doesn’t recognize me.
Neither of them are chanting.
My throat swells, and I rip my gaze away, blinking back tears. The bell tolls again, and the crowd becomes silent, though the drums continue to beat.
Cainon places his hands over mine, urging me to lift the bow. Forcing me to look down the line of the unarmed weapon to where Vanth is trussed up a hundred feet away, his eyes now bulging with unmistakable fear.
Cainon points toward a lump of hay. “Shoot right there. It’ll ignite the pyre’s base, and he’ll burn nice and slow.”
His words are the smell of scorched flesh torn from the past, presented to me like a gift. They’re more death pinned against my already haunted conscience.
A terrible tremble rattles me from the inside out …
“You’ve donemuchworse,” he purrs, creating more fissures in my domes.
Spawning more sprouts of crippling emotion.
“This will be a breeze compared to stabbing someone through the heart at close range.”
I swear the ground softens beneath my feet, my hands now coated inhisblood as I watch him slip away.
Fall backward into a frothy waterfall.
It’s an effort not to sob. To split apart andscream.
I step from tragedy to tragedy, toting death like tombstones collecting beneath my ribs. And I realize with heartbreaking finality that I got the wrong monster in that jungle.
I got the wrong one.
“Don’t be nervous.” Planting a kiss on my cheek, Cainon shifts toward the stack of arrows, plucks one up, then swipes the bandaged tip through the fire. A churn of flames swallows the bind of white material, and a collective gasp echoes from the crowd.
A sea of eyes turn to me as Cainon helps me notch the arrow, and a woman somewhere howls—a coarse, throaty sound that curdles my blood.
I don’t look in that direction. Don’t want to see who that haunting eddy belongs to. Vanth may have done a terrible thing, but he’s still a son. A brother.
Perhaps a promised.
