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“Antoine,” the king says. My godfather lifts his eyes from the baby to meet the king’s. “If he challenges my heir, he will die . . . even if I must do it myself.”

Chapter Forty-Six

When I take my next breath, it’s like I haven’t inhaled in minutes. My lungs burn and my vision spots. We are back on the floor of the Archive of Honors, both still soaked with seawater and shivering. Lonan uses his sword to push himself to his knees.

Our eyes meet for a harrowing moment, the weight of what we’ve seen pressing in on both of us.

And then I tackle him.

He yelps and falls flat on his back as I straddle his chest. He’s dropped his sword—apparently not willing to actually fight me. But I’m not trying to hurt him anyway. Instead, I tug loose his tie, ripping his shirt open and letting buttons fly.

There it is.

Lonan stares up at me, coldness and resignation and rage and a lifetime of pain and Darkness in his eyes. But mine study the mark. That scar that I’ve wondered about so often, that dips below the collar of his shirt, descends down into a jagged point at his heart. And there, the dark marks begin.

Like forks of lightning or the roots of trees, dusky black branches stretch around his chest, down his abdomen, tracing olive skin and hard muscle.

“This is why you’ve never needed a Dark anchor. You don’t need to channel it through an object.” It’s in his very flesh.

He swallows. “Yes.”

The Darkness is his native tongue. How often had I thought that before? I had no idea how right I was.

He was the baby on the ship, the one discarded by the king. Which means . . .

“You’re the rightful heir of Gault.” The words themselves feel dangerous to whisper, as if the walls themselves are listening. Lonan only stares at me, panting, his glasses slightly askew.

“Did you know?” I ask him sternly. I am done with the secrets being held from me tonight.

He reaches up a hand to straighten his glasses, and with a deep breath, he says, “No. I didn’t know.” There’s devastation behind those many-masked eyes, and I nearly feel sorry for him.

I study him as he holds my gaze, unflinching. “Am I supposed to kneel now?”

He snorts. “You would never.” His eyes rove over my frame. “I’m sorry, Vesper,” he whispers. “I should’ve stopped him.” After all he’s just witnessed—his father rejecting him, his mother’s anguish—he’s brought us back to my father.

I go still, mentally retreating from this discussion. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to run from him, be rid of him, never look at his stupid handsome face ever again.

All my pain, all my grief, threatens to well inside me. I feel it building, a sticky, ugly Darkness ready to curse Lonan again.

He closes his eyes. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

“Good. I won’t.” I should. The thought springs unwelcome, but it’s true. He was just a boy when my father died. He trusted my godfather—the only parental figure he’d ever known. Just as I did. The man who protected him as a baby from the wrath of the king.

My heart is broken. Lonan’s heart is not. He cannot shut down the Dark inside him—the passion and chaos and destruction—the way I can. Lonan has always been all heart, all feeling, a sea of fury so deep it threatens to consume him and everyone around him. Of course he found refuge in the Dark. Of course he trusted Van Asten.

He laughs mirthlessly. “Saints. That mouth of yours . . .” He shakes his head as if to steady himself. He opens his eyes, and those irises of pure night pin me, even as I still pin him to the floor of the archive. I’m a specimen, a moth nailed to a board by eyes sharp as daggers.

“I was a coward,” he says. “I was too afraid of him. Too . . . possessed by him.”

My godfather, who saved him and me, who fought to unite magic despite the selfishness and shortsightedness of King Marcel. I cannot believe that he killed my father. They loved each other—closer than brothers. And my godfather betrayed him.

When I look down at Lonan’s handsome face, I see the same adrift feeling written on his expression that whirls in my head. His shirt lies open where I’ve torn it apart, marred chest exposed, and it occurs to me how strange it is that both of us, while working so closely together for so long, hid these markings from the world. My poetry. His Darkness. Two halves of the same reprehensible coin.

Watching me steadily, that Darkness and uncertainty swirling in the shadows of his eyes, Lonan moves his hands, his fingers resting in the folds of my legs where my calves meet my thighs. And it’s only then that I realize that I’m still sitting on him, that he hasn’t forced me off.

I open my mouth, likely to say something I’ll regret, when voices break through the night air. The trio of Sisters.

“Congratulations, Gossemort students. You have endured the second trial. What has been seen has been seen. What remains hidden, remains hidden. Your third and final test is destruction. The Dark destroys. The Light creates. You will be tempted to destroy. You will be tempted to corrupt. But our warning is this—you reap what you sow. Good luck . . . and good night.”