“You think I didn’t know it was you?” His words were low and quiet, but I heard them clear across the courtyard. He tilted his head, examining me, roving over my now undisguised face, and I feltstrangely vulnerable again. Anger rose in my chest, anger at myself that he still had the power to make me feel.
I moved back a half step, that anger burning into my tone. “You can’t have.”
“You didn’t change your hands,” he said, his voice a little rough. He held up his own right fist and pointed to his knuckles.
“I remember every scar on your body. Especially the ones I gave you. I felt that scar across your knuckles when you first came to the palace.”
My heart lurched. I remembered the way he’d held my hand that day. The slow way he’d bent over and kissed my knuckles. His lips had brushed right over my scar.
“You knew and didn’t say anything?” My skin felt cold. “You knew it was me. The entire time when we—”
I thought of our kiss, about when I had come to his room and what we had almost done. About every time I had flirted with him, when I had thought I was manipulating the situation. But the entire time he’d been doing the manipulating.
Fresh rage bled through me, as well as the hot flush of shame that he had outsmarted me again, even when I had been most on guard.
“I wanted to see what your plan was. And… I felt guilty. About what I’d done.” He looked away, his lips thinning. “And I wanted to know how far you were going to take this. I would have stopped it before we… But in the end it was you who stopped it.” He took a step closer. “I didn’t know you’d escaped. The warden never told anyone. You escaped one of the most savage prisons in the empire. Then you came right back here. Why?”
“You know why,” I growled as we circled each other. “You betrayed me. You betrayed my father. And now he’s dead.” I advanced, my voice nearly cracking with the weight of my anger. “You stole my whole life from me.”
His expression was anguished but hard. “I was trying to get you out of there.”
I pursed my lips together. “I don’t believe you.”
“Did you not wonder why you hadn’t been executed? Your father would have been spared had he not been killed before I could intervene. I managed to smuggle you out to the prison and save your life.”
“You sentenced me to suffer!” I shouted, that black rage seeping through me. Those whispered words, that voice that I recognized now, the djinn’s voice, saying the same word over and over and over.
Revenge. Revenge. Revenge.
Maz’s face was stricken.
I kept walking toward him, my sword raised. “You sentenced me to be tortured and tormented.” My words were guttural, and with every step, his eyes grew bleaker. “To wonder why the person Ilovedhad betrayed me. So why would you try to save my life when you had already destroyed it?” The last words were a whisper, ravaged and soft.
Mazin’s fists were curled at his sides, his knuckles white. “Because it was the only thing I could think to do to save you. And they would have killed you.”
“No, you just wanted me to live in agony.”
“I didn’t want that either.” He shook his head, his eyes pleading.
“Then why?” I hated the way my voice cracked, I hated that I cared about his answer. I hated that I couldn’t just run him through with my blade without thought. But I needed to know. I needed whatever answer he could give. “Why?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw, and he looked away, as if he could no longer meet my eyes.
“Vahid killed my mother. He laughed about it. I was never going to let him get away with it. But everything went wrong. Instead of rallying the northern tribes to overthrow the emperor, the warlord’s death was blamed on you.”
“So, you admit you staged it?”
He shook his head, his mouth grim. “No. It was my plan to work with the warlord, to take the throne from the emperor and overwhelm his forces. But the man was dead before I even had the chance.”
“Liar!” I spat. “It was you who killed him. You who left his burned-out body for me to find.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because after everything, you still chose the emperor. Getting rid of the warlord was convenient. His death might have started a civil war if it wasn’t blamed on me. I was the next best thing.”
“Dani, I was going to get you out of that prison, I promise. But first—”
“First you had to watch my father die and pursue your own vengeance? Is that it? Even if your story is true, even if you didn’t plan this entire thing to frame me, you still let me take the blame. All so you could get your own revenge on the emperor. You owed me more than that.”
