This is not what I planned.
I'm screaming the words in my head, but for some reason, I can't get them out.
“The divine flame in Dralsk will burn again,” he goes on. “You'll help me light it, and you will look beautiful in its glow, despite your scars. And everything will change from that point forward.”
“And if I don't help you?”
He goes quiet, something unreadable crossing his face.
“Before you decide against it,” he eventually says, “you should know that I've gotten quite skilled at using our bond to control the most powerful dragons who soar through Mouren's skies. Renounce whatever relationship you havewith the Mouren King, return willingly to my kingdom and stand at my side, or this will be a much messier reunion than I was hoping for.”
I don't manage a response, because at that moment, pain flares hot and sudden through the brand on my arm.
A warning.
And I realize, then, that I have no idea exactly how this mark binds us together—or what damage he could truly inflict through it.
“I'll give you a few hours to think it over.” With this, he rises, moving toward the exit.
He's nearly to the cave's mouth when a question slips out of me before I can stop it.
“Did you ever really love me?”
He pauses.
I fight the urge to curl into myself. To take the words back. It feels so foolish to even care about his answer now, after everything he’s done. So pointless. Like trying to light a candle in the middle of a rainstorm.
He looks back, studying me in silence, and I think I catch a glimpse of the man I loved. Or maybe it’s just my mind playing tricks, trying to protect me—because he’s not there, wasneverreally there.
“Love is weakness,” he says. “Love is the reason Gareth was able to manipulate the Mouren King. And I suspect it will be that king's ultimate downfall, now that I have you.”
It takes me far too long to find my voice again, and when I do, only three words come to mind. “You're a monster.”
“Something tells me you will be too, before this is finished.” He flashes me a quick smile before turning away. “And what a legendary pair we'll make when that moment comes.”
Chapter Forty-Four
The world feels like it’s shrinking, my grief folding in on itself, closing me off from everything outside of my own wrecked, broken mind.
I try to keep my eyes on the opening of the cave, to remind myself that this isn't an ending. Not yet. There's still life outside of the miserable ball I've curled into, if I can just stay focused on it—the smell of pine and cold air drifting in from the darkness; hints of whispered conversations; flickers of light from campfires and the occasional ember caught in the wind, carried across the mouth of the cave.
Somewhere out there, Mal is walking around, breathing and scheming and carrying on as he apparently always has.
Alive.
I still can't believe he's alive.
An hour passes. Then another. He doesn't come back. I don't know if Iwanthim to come back. All these years, I would have given anything—absolutelyanything—to see him again, but now I realize what a fool I was for hoping for that.
The greatest fool who ever lived, because I actually thought he loved me.
And as I sit with this realization, a second, even darker one creeps into my mind: If Malachi was able to fool me so thoroughly, then who's to say the rest of the world hasn't been doing the same thing?
It's really just the same fear I've been fighting for years, with new life breathed into it: the fear that everyone is only waiting to abandon me once they take what they need and realize the rest of me isn't worth keeping. The fear that I'm too much for anyone to fully know and accept. That I was never meant to be anything more than a tool, a weapon, and certainly not made to be loved the way a normal person could be loved.
Ruined, Mal said.
It’s hard not to believe him when I look back and see how I’ve brought war to Mouren’s doorstep. When I admit to myself that I can’t heal Reave or his brother or anything else I love. I’m too dangerous, too weak to carry divine power and wield it for good—what other proof of this do I need, aside from the way I left Briar lying in a pool of blood before running away from her?
