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Of course, it could all have been an elaborate act. A ruse… But to what end?

Gideon could not guess that.

“Yes, you did,” he said coldly. “If anything you told me is true, then you did have a choice. You could have asked me for help, and I would have granted it.”

He paused, then added, his voice thick with bitterness, “By God, you’re right. I was incredibly naive. I felt sorry for you. I wanted to save you, to save your brother… Is he even real? Or did you make him up to garner my sympathy?”

There was a long silence. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear it.

“He is real.” The words seemed to cost her something. “But he’ll probably die because of my mistakes. And I’ll have to live with that… Probably not for very long, though.” She paused again, and when she continued, her voice held a fierce edge. “But don’t sit there all high and mighty and pretend I was the only one full of mistrust. You didn’t trust me either.”

“I did trust you,” he said through gritted teeth. “Against my better judgment, I did. And I was wrong for that.”

“When exactly did you trust me?” Her voice was sharp now, cutting. “When I was tied to your bed?”

He flinched. “No,” he said, his voice quieter now. “Just before then, actually.”

“Just before then, I didn’t know you well enough. And neither did you.” There was a rustling sound as she shifted in her chains, and he heard the pain in the small gasp she tried to suppress. “I was told you were ruthless and vile, and that I had to kill you. Once I formed my own opinion of you, once I thought I could ask you for help, you stopped trusting me completely.

“Be honest with yourself,” she continued. “If I had told you I was going to lock you in the cellar and set the house on fire as a distraction—to make the Cardinal think you’d perished—would you have gone along with it? Or would you have mistrusted me even more? Would you have fought me on that plan?”

Would he?

Gideon found himself actually considering the question.

By then, he mistrusted everything she’d said.

The only reason that changed was that the fire had made him mad with fear.

He’d been reliving his nightmare, and it had taken hours of holding her in his arms to return to some semblance of rational thought.

But he wasn’t rational.

He’d been so grateful he’d saved her, so relieved not to have lost her to the flames, that he’d forgiven everything in that moment. He’d believed everything she said.

But before that…?

“If you had told me you were planning to fake my death,” he said finally, “we could have come up with a better plan. Yours—if that was truly what you wanted—didn’t even work.”

“Because the Cardinal never intended to let me live.” Her voice broke on the words, and he heard her shift again, the chains clinking softly in the darkness. “I’m afraid they’ll kill Emir, too.”

Despite everything, despite his anger and his determination to hate her, the raw pain in her voice affected him.

The mention of her brother, an innocent boy, afraid and alone, tugged at his heartstrings.

Here we go again.

How easily she manipulates me.

“So Emir does exist,” he said, though he couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of his voice.

Her voice was hollow as she said, “For now.”

In the silence that followed, Gideon found himself wrestling with emotions he didn’t want to feel. Part of him wanted to comfort her, to tell her they’d find a way to save her brother.

But the other part tried very hard not to care.

“We could have saved him if you had just trusted me,” he said, and even as the words left his mouth, he knew they were cruel. “Now we’re all going to rot.”