A laugh slips from his mouth. “I can’t wait to hear this.”
She smiles smugly.
A plan she’s already set on, then.
“I’ll be wearing a costume in the color of rust this evening.”
Rust.
“Of course you are,” Kael offers, a smirk dimpling his cheek.
Of course she’s walking into the wolf’s mouth wearing the color of the enemy.
“I’ll come out wearing its skin, Kael,” she purrs, and she walks away toward the stairs to Rhaema.
Fuck.There is not a chance this plan will work.
Which means they’re absolutely going to do it anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Some poisons kill, some merely stay
And slowly steal the self away
Rubi has not touchedher flask for hours.
Not because she hasn’t thought about it—she has. The burn of it. The dulling quiet it brings. The softening of edges. The way it makes the world feel manageable again. Makes it feel like a place she can survive.
Her fingers twitch toward it.
Just once.
One swallow to blunt the terror. One burn to quiet the part of her that already knows she cannot fix this cleanly. Her hand closes around the flask. She lifts it halfway. Then stops.
No.
Not because she is strong. Not because she doesn’t want it. Because the work is louder than the wound.
Rubi shoves the flask across the table hard enough that it skids into a pile of parchment.
Purpose, then. If she cannot be sober for herself, she can be sober for this. Because purpose does what liquor never can—it does not soften the world. It sharpens her enough to face it.
The threvenar is cut with a binder strong enough to withstand her best extraction methods.
Someonecut the threvenar with a binder.
She hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten. Hasn’t left the apothecary since the sun fell and rose again.
Rubi didn’t always drink like this. Didn’t always snort dreamroot and frostmint and voidroot and whatever else she could find like a soldier trying to forget the atrocities of war.
She didn’t do a lot of things before Maldrak purged Kryntar Castle. Before she watched legacies, lineages, and lovers scorched from Zerynthia. Before she blamed herself for part of it. But alcohol burns memories from minds, and substances erase the ability to feel the ones that return, even if only for a while. So she drinks. And she used threvenar. Smoked it, drank it, inhaled it if heat was all she had available. Anything to forget. Anything to cast the memories into distant ghosts.
Rubi knows how threvenar works.
And this?This is all wrong.
She just can’t figure outhow.
