I gave him a small bite, thinking it’d give him the energy to make it the rest of the way to the ocean. But it was a mistake. Masin wasn’t coherent enough to eat. He started choking, and someone saw us,immediately coming after me.
The guy attacked me with a knife. I tried to fight him off—Masin needed the food—but I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t paying attention to what my brother was doing. I was so focused on making sure he’d get a proper meal that I hadn’t seen him jump on top of the guy, hadn’t seen his body get shoved into the river as he stopped the knife from slitting my throat.
It should have been me that died.
I’d never screamed so much in my life, never cried so much. I fell to my knees, completely forgetting about the moldy bread as the guy ran off with it, leaving me without the only thing that ever truly mattered.
Masin and I had been alone our entire lives. We never knew our parents, but we always had each other.
Only seconds passed while I was sobbing and pleading by the riverbank when Dahes found me. I made my deal without even thinking, without even looking up from the water to see that it was the devil standing before me.
If he could bring Masin back to life, I’d do anything…
And I did. I spent the past seven years destroying myself, slowly killing my soul, but what got me through was knowing that my little brother was alive somewhere on the streets.
Except now he was dead. It was all for nothing.
I fell to my knees now, screaming just as loudly as I had been back then, begging for Masin to come back. My vision and mind were playing tricks on me, and I couldn’t tell the present from the past. It didn’t matter, my brother was dead in both realities.
I might have registered Dahes laughing. I might have registered Hael cursing and trying to attack him through his chains, even though he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t feel anything toward me anymore, not after what I did to him.
But I was too empty to care. Even if my physical body was still alive, I was dead on the inside, existing only for my lungs to bleed and my throat to rip to pieces as I screamed and screamed.
Chapter Forty-Six
Rage
MAGNOLIA
At some point, the sentries dragged me back to my room, but I had no concept of time.
I felt so broken.
I didn’t eat, didn’t bathe, didn’t move, didn’t even bother going to my bed—I just collapsed onto the floor and sobbed until I had no tears left.
Until I couldn’t cry anymore, couldn’t feel…
I was numb, dead on the inside, and all I wanted to be was dead on the outside too. I wanted to see Masin again—even if it was in the After.
I wasn’t processing time anymore, wasn’t feeling anything. All those years of trying to make myself numb, and I’d finally done it.
I stayed on the floor, not caring that my back ached, that I was resting on my arm at a bad angle, that the cold was seeping into my bones.
I didn’t feel anything.
Except it wasn’t enough. Being dead wasn’t going to fix this.
I needed Dahes to pay. I couldn’t let him win, couldn’t let him take anything else from me.
Because Hael was still alive somewhere in the castle.
Rage coursed through me. I fucking hated him, hated what he had made me become over the past seven years. Hated the lies, the manipulation, the pure fucking evilness he possessed.
I destroyed everything in my room. Every piece of furniture was ripped to shreds, not caring that my hands were slowly becoming a bloody mess in the process.
I welcomed it,neededthe physical pain to drown out the emotional turmoil that was spiraling inside me.
I started pacing my room, splintered wood cutting into my feet as I walked.
