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I always thought my worst nightmare was Asha dying.
I’m realizing I was wrong. This, what I’ve done to her, is so, so much worse.
“Kiran, is it true?” asks Fin.
I turn to look at my brother, but I have no answer.“Please, Kiran,” Asha says.
I swallow the grief in my throat as I look up at my wife and nod, slowly.
“You’ll need to unbind me to make this happen,” I say, my voice flat as I turn to Azrael.
He stiffens, looking back and forth between me and Asha, uncertainty flickering in his eyes.
Lydia scoffs in Azrael’s direction. “Oh, we know you’re not that stupid. You knew you’d have to unbind him if you wanted his magic.”
The bile in my stomach sours at her words, because maybe Azrael doesn’t need me at all. Maybe he has another leeching stone and can simply drain my magic from me. But my dread is short-lived, because Azrael straightens. “Of course I did. But I need reassurances,” he says. “Reassurances that you won’t attack us. That you won’t hurt me. Not now. Not ever.”
Ice skitters through my veins.
“You have my word,” I say. Immediately, the fae curse snaps into place around my neck. “As long as you let my siblings go free of harm, and swear that never, until the day you die, will you lay an unwanted hand on Asha.”
Az stiffens. “I’ll need your word from both of you,” he says to Fin and Lydia. “And you won’t fight my guards as they escort you out of the palace.”
“As long as Elias remains safe, you have mine,” says Lydia.
Fin takes longer, surveying Asha with grief in his eyes. “Just don’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to, and you have mine too.”
Az smiles. “Then we’re all agreed.”
The fae bargains snap into place, and just barely, I think I see a flicker of worry in Asha’s beautiful, haunting eyes.
Several of the guards remove Lydia and Fin from the premises, carrying Elias’s limp body with them.
A nearby guard removes my shackles.
I smile at my wife, just faintly, and reach for her hand, readying to take any feelings away she might have for me, searching her face for any sense she might have changed her mind.
Please change your mind. Please let this be one of your tricks, I whisper to her with the yearning in my eyes.
Tears roll down Asha’s cheek.
She looks at my outstretched hand, free of its bonds, then whips a dagger from her belt and turns it on her own heart.
CHAPTER 110
ZORA
By the time we reach the entrance of the winding cavern where Nox stepped through the eyelet, the stench is almost unbearable. Farin is still having difficulty moving his left arm, a byproduct of his wound.
I can tell it hurts him by the way he swallows in between words. The way his sentences are sometimes cut short.
But he doesn’t complain.
When we reach the cave that once housed the eyelet, a draft runs up my sleeve, causing the hairs on my arms to stand on edge.
“I’m guessing you felt that,” says Farin.
I nod. “It was coming from the back wall of the cave, not the tunnels.”
