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My mouth cracked open and I could taste the dried salt from the ocean still on my lips. “Where am I?”
His look pinned me. “You’re back where you started.”
“Netherstone?”
How was that even possible? Did he have a time machine he’d never told me about?
A pathetic cough bubbled up from my chest and eked out of my mouth. “How?”
He didn’t move from his spot at the wall. “I had it rebuilt. Brick by brick, brought up from the valley floor, exactly as it was.”
How in the hell had he done that? It wouldn’t have even been possible for the carnage the castle had smashed into.
“But it—it was destroyed. Destroyed. Impossible.”
“Yes.” He pushed himself off the wall, his arms dropping by his sides. “And I rebuilt it exactly as it was. Using everything that was salvageable from the rubble.”
“How?”
“An army of men working around the clock for four years.” His eyes drifted off me, looking around at the blocks surrounding us, and his hand reached out, gently caressing the stone he’d been leaning against. “The castle is set back farther into the mountain now, of course. Lucky that it was only a slice of the mountain that fell along with it.”
Madness. Pure madness.
Was this what I would suffer? Damen unhinged in every aspect?
My eyes closed for a long moment and when I reopened them, he was staring at me again. Glaring, more to the point. The earlier hatred I’d seen exploding in his eyes now a simmer, but still just as flammable as the moment it’d first appeared in him.
“Why? Why rebuild it?”
“It was all I had left of…” He cut his words with a vicious shake of his head. “I was already unearthing every single stone. Every shred of wood. Every tattered sheet. Turning over every scrap from the valley floor.”
“Why would you do that?”
His glare centered on me, his hatred drilling into my soul. “To find what was lost.”
My chest seized inward on itself, my breath cutting off.
I’d done that. Done that to him.
Taken what he spent years looking for. Taken Venetia.
The weight of it so suffocating on my chest, I couldn’t even look at him.
Footfalls clunked across the dank stone toward me. One. Two. Three.
He stopped next to me, the electrified air that came with him prickling across the bare skin of my arms. I could feel him drop down next to me, could hear his exhale of breath.
Welcome whatever was next.
That was the promise I’d made myself in those moments when I pulled Venetia from the rubble of Netherstone. Half carried her away from the destruction.
For I always knew this day would come. The day he found me. The day he caught me.
Evade. Fight. Do everything not to be caught.
But now I was.
Welcome whatever was next.
