“You need to calm down.” There was a vial in her hand, and I felt the tip of it pierce my skin. Her gaze was clear as she looked right into my eyes. “I don’t want to do this, but I will if I have to.” For emphasis, she pushed the needle half an inch further.
I blew out a breath, not realizing how close I was to her. A strand of her purple hair blew across her face, but she didn’t move to swipe it away. Instead, she held my gaze, not looking away, not the slightest bit terrified that I could kill her in a split second.
“They’re dead,” I finally said, not knowing why I felt the need to say it out loud. Everyone saw what happened. Everyone in the tent was watching. “They’re all going to die because of me.”
My brother—my little brother who had nothing to do with this…
“I know,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Sie.”
My knees bucked at her sincerity. She didn’t know them. She didn’t know Moli or my father, she barely even knew me, yet the way she was looking at me felt like she saw through to my soul. The broadcast was meant to make everyone hate me. It was meant to make everyone so deathly terrified of me that they’d kill me without a second thought.
Guilt washed over me, entwining with my anger and shock. Iwas hurting more from the loss of my friend—from losing Moli—than I was from my own flesh and blood.
I should have cared more.
There was a small part of me that was devastated I lost my father—a very small, minuscule part. It was a part I didn’t want to access. I wasn’t ready to face what it meant. He still raised me. He was a horrible fucking Advenian. What the servants said were all true. He used to force me to do terrible things to them and I would—I had to—or he’d take his aggression out on my brother and me.
But now, it didn’t matter what I thought of him. He was dead.
The King just murdered him in front of everyone, but my fear for what he might still do to Greyland was outweighing almost any of the grief I had for my father.
Grey was what had me screaming. Grey was what had me needing to destroy everything.
I feared for what he could still take. He fucking destroyed me during the broadcast. I didn’t want to be like my father. I hated him. But yet, as I watched the footage back, I couldn’t deny that I was him.
I knew the video was edited, that not everything happened the way they portrayed it. But another part of me couldn’t deny a lot of what I just watched was raw and real. Some of it actually happened. There were parts of it that didn’t have to be manipulated to make me into a monster.I was one.
I couldn’t stomach watching it. And seeing Scotlind standing on that stage, witnessing everything I’d done to her with a stoic fucking expression, broke me further. She was the one person I had wanted to convince I was good. And seeing her do nothing, watching her just stand idle as they ruined me, felt like she was holding the knife to my throat. I was clinging to the shreds of Scotlind’s forgiveness, hoping I could still get her back, but now it was gone. I no longer wanted it.
I didn’t know how to process everything I was feeling. The mix of emotions and confusion was too much. On a good day, I could barely get myself to believe I wasn’t in another illusion. But this was real.Shewouldn’t be here if it wasn’t real. Seeing Savannah confirmed it all happened.
Her eyebrows scrunched under me. Her gaze was assessing. She watched the damning broadcast, everyone had. I didn’t know where that put me. Would everyone in the camp believe it? Wouldshe? I had no fucking idea why it even mattered to me.
I was still caging her in, my forearms grazing hers. I could feel everyone in the tent watching us, waiting to see if they needed to intervene and protect the mortal from me. They should.
Savannah leaned forward on her tiptoes so we were eye level with one another, my body hunched over, leaning forward without meaning to. I was waiting for her to inject me, waiting for her to push the needle the rest of the way in and take me far away from this torture. I wanted to be gone. I wanted her to put me into oblivion.
But she withdrew the needle. My gaze snagged on her movements as she threw it onto the table out of reach, leaving herself vulnerable. Before I could tell her how stupid that was, that I could kill her if she didn’t douse me, she pressed her body against mine and pulled me into a hug.
And I shattered.
“My father doesn’t knowabout Tezya,” Dovelyn said later that night. “Whatever they’re doing to Scotlind, I don’t think she’s told them anything vital.”
Dravenburg still wasn’t in the loop about the trade, and we wanted to keep it that way, so Tezya called a private meeting in his tent to go over everything.
I was relaxed enough to sit through it, but it was only due to taking some sort of concoction Savannah gave me to help calm my nerves. She told me her brother created it, a potion of some sort. I downed it in one gulp, not bothering to thank her for it, and then tried my best not to spit it out the next second. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever tasted—worse than the poison. I figured she had offered the same potion to Tezya, but I had no idea if he took it. We were both train wrecks, barely functioning. I tried not to think about how I literally cried into her arms after the broadcast. She mercifully didn’t say anything about it, and now, I was purposely avoiding her gaze as we discussed what tomorrow would bring.
“What makes you think that?” Kallon asked.
“Because you don’t know my father. All he thinks about is this prophecy. He’s consumed by it. He doesn’t want it to come true. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known him to be afraid of. If he found out Tezya is the one it’s about, he would’ve turned everything on him, but instead he requested the both of us alive.” The princess paused to look at me. “I don’t think you fully realize what the King has done to you, Sie. You have a target on your back. If anyone sees you, they’ll kill you without question. He wants to keep Scottie alive so he can use her enhancement and as leverage against Tezya to get him to obey. He still believes you two are the key to the prophecy. It’s the main reason he targeted you. He wants you dead. He wants the rebellion squashed and the prophecy threat eliminated. And he wants a way to kill off the lower ranks while placing the blame on someone else. He managed to do all of that and handle you at the same time. That broadcast was—”
The princess didn’t need to finish her sentence for me to know where she was going with it. The broadcast was my fucking damnation. It made me out to be the most twisted, vile Advenian alive. There was no way I could come back from how they portrayed me.
I had needed another two doses of Wells’ calming potion when Dovelyn first explained the reason Scotlind was sent to Tennebris. The fact that she framed us—that she set everything up and was the reason we had to perform the blood bond at our wedding… I probably would have murdered her if I wasn’t more pissed off at the Lux King.
“I’m going to turn myself in,” I said into the silence.
“No, you aren’t,” Peter snapped immediately. “That’s completely out of the question.” He was probably the only person in this tent who cared.
