Page 206 of The Sun He Buried

“She meant it.”

“She usually does.” I flick a non-existent dust mote from my coat.

The iron taste deepens.

He searches my eyes.

Baldr has spent a lifetime doing that. I’ve spent the same lifetime giving him poor material.

“Why your room?”

There it is.

Closer. Quieter. Empty of servants. Nowhere near the guest corridor a drunk human and a Sanguir would have woken.

I choose the one that cuts.

“She knew whose hands were on her when she fell asleep.”

Baldr goes still.

The words enter him.

Then the wound opens.

It comes through him whole—every night he held her, every easy laugh, every plan he let himself build because she came to his bed and reached for his hand. Under all of it sits the snowbank. He left to bring help. He came back and she had trusted me to carry her away.

My brother can’t hide any of it from me.

I put it there anyway.

I let the smile reach my eyes.

The taste nearly makes me choke.

At the dinner thirteen years ago, I hurt him and kept the reason. Four words would’ve changed the blood on his hands. She fed on you. I buried them because I could survive being the villain more easily than he could survive knowing he’d been used.

That defense has kept well.

It doesn’t belong here.

Every other time I’ve hurt him, something hid underneath it—a theft to stop, a threat to cut down, a kindness I couldn’t let him see. This morning, there’s only the wound.

I love my brother.

A useless fact, now that I’ve found the exact sentence that can gut him and put it between us for no better reason than he has what I want and can still see the wanting on me.

Baldr looks toward the windows.

His hands stay at his sides.

He won’t give me the anger I came for.

The hurt stays open. Quiet. It tastes worse that way.

“You went looking for me,” he says.

“I was passing.”