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I couldn’t.
I closed my eyes tight against the vision, the man fate had chosen for me. Because that man wasn’t here.
“Brianna,” my sister gasped from beside me. I opened my eyes to find the room full of men; Division soldiers and the man who had stabbed me.
“I’m fine,” I promised Emily, but my shaking voice betrayed me. She pulled me to her, squeezing tight as she stared over my back. When she drew away, her gaze met Aern’s.
“It’s fine,” I said again, hating the look that passed between them. “You couldn’t have known. No one could have known.”
Emily’s gaze returned to mine, and I implored her to side with me, to not let him take the blame for one more thing that had gone wrong. She sighed.
“I suppose not,” she murmured, knowing that Aern would understand the implication. I was the prophet, after all.
He stepped forward, regret obvious in his features, but he didn’t say he was sorry. Not after I’d threatened him for it the weeks before. “It is our job to know,” Aern said. “And we should have seen this coming.”
Brendan was suddenly beside us, the skin of his cheek and neck red and bruising. “I’ll stand watch over Brianna.”
I swallowed hard, unable to look at any of them.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aern said. “She’ll need a fulltime guard. You have too many responsibilities.”
Brendan stared at him, but he didn’t have much room to argue. He was still running the men of the Division, still managing a dozen houses and multiple businesses. Things would fall back together, all under Aern’s command, but only after this threat was handled.
I glanced down at my hands, puffy and raw, and saw the blood smeared on my torn shirt. “It’s my fault. I should have seen this.” My eyes met Aern’s. “I didn’t make Morgan remove the sway from everyone. He only did it to the men that were there.”
Aern winced at the reminder of that night, the night he had stabbed me, and I wanted to grab him and shake him. He’d done everything he could to subvert Morgan’s order, and though he couldn’t have stopped the action, he had managed to not hit anything important. “It’s not your fault,” I said again. “None of it was your fault.”
He reached up to squeeze my arm. “It won’t happen again, Brianna. I swear to you, you will be safe.”
