"No, love. I have no need for any more money or reputation. I just want to help you."
I eye the door behind him, and he puts his hands above his head, kicking his sword across the uneven floor away from us both. "I'm not here to hurt you."
Oh, gods. I've spent hours every day thinking about the moment someone might find out, and now it's here, I feel so horrifically unprepared. "Renna, you're hyperventilating. Sit down."
"Oh, no.Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no."
"Renna, breathe with me,” he pleads, as my vision goes blurry. I'm going to faint. I beg my body not to betray me because I am sure I’ll wake up in a cage. My heart beats so fast that it’s almost a buzz, a nauseating sheen of sweat prickling my skin.
I don’t want to faint. I’m scared. I desperately try to breathe, try to focus on his voice, but everything goes black.
Chapter20
The Poor Headboard (Renna)
Iwake up groggy and dazed, a cold cloth being pressed to my forehead.
The lingering stench of smelling salts wafts beneath my nose. Lynna and Aanen, another of the King's healers I recognise, are looking down at me with concerned expressions. So I’m not in a cage yet. "You gave us a little fright, Renna. Your breathing went very weak.”
I blink to try and focus my vision, not sure if I can trust them. "Rexxan?" I whisper.
"He had to leave to help with an attack on the city. He'll be back any second now," explains Lynna.
Is Rexxan alright? I hope he's alright. Why do I even care? Recent, yet confusingly distant memories flood back to me, and dread wraps her evil hands around my neck. Rexxan knows.Lynnafucking knows. What will she do with me? She collects rare things, right? My eyes widen, flinching away from her touch. She takes her hands off me, frowning down at me with a worried expression.
"You know," I whisper, once we are alone.
"I do, Renna, but I will not utter a word of it to you, or to anyone else unless you have brought it up. Neither of us will."
Rexxan comes back as she finishes her sentence, ducking to fit his oversized body through the door frame. He looks devastating in leather armour that hugs every muscle of his body. His hair is in a small, tousled bun, a dark strand escaping and hanging over his eye.I’m weak for him.
"Is that deliberate?"
"Is what deliberate?"
"The hair over the eye?" I ask, and he looks genuinely baffled. I scowl at him. He doesn't look real. I currently look like I’ve been put through a meat grinder and then reassembled, badly. He leans his sword against the wall, pulling leather wraps off his wrists and coming straight over.
"I was worried about you, love."
I’m coming to terms with the fact that I don’t hate that particular nickname. "I'm okay."
"Thank the gods," he says, tucking some hair behind my ear.
"No, thank Lynna," I correct him, and Lynna smiles graciously. She's so beautiful, it's depressing. She doesn't look real either.
Rexxan gazes down fondly at me, his eyes shining with some unnamed emotion. "What's going on in that head of yours?"
"You're a real softie beneath that hard exterior, you know that?"
"Tell anyone and I'll skin you alive."
I smile, not having it in me to laugh. I have to tell him about my brother. I ask them both to sit.
"Onyx...Onyx was adopted by my parents from an orphanage when he was fifty years old. At this point, my father had been beating me and my mother relatively badly, and she feared for her life. My mother was Ember. The last sorceress. She was taking the Delsk Potion that made her look mortal like I do now. She knew the chances of her conceiving a sorceress with a mortal were less than one in a thousand, so she didn't worry when she accidentally fell pregnant with me.
“But when I came along, born with bright orange eyes unlike his or my mother’s, my father believed the father was not him. He despised me; a reminder of his wife's supposed indefinitely. He hit her into being weaker and weaker, which meant the potion sickness got worse and worse—do not be fooled into feeling sorry for her. She was even more of a monster than he was, twisted and mangled into something horrible by the way she had been treated by others. She adopted Onyx, and hit him and hit him until the only thing he knew was to keep me safe.”
“That’s awful,” whispers Lynna, a haunted look in her eyes.
