This Dark Descent, page 28
She recoiled. “What are you?”
Rezek smiled. “I think you know. You can feel it, can’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
He laughed, running one finger along the chains to her wrist before retreating to the doorway. “You mean only as much to Damien as you can do for him.”
And she had done all she could already. The golem was made, the race nearly won. What use did he have for her now?
Stop it. She shoved the dark thoughts aside. If Damien didn’t need her, he wouldn’t have bought her that dress, wouldn’t be helping her discover her new abilities, wouldn’t have said the things he’d said.
She hated how little effort it took for her to believe that someone would discard her.
“You think I’m lying, don’t you?” Rezek asked, a strange sort of twisted pity in his voice. “Didn’t you ever wonder how those men found you?”
Her head jerked up before she could stop it, and Rezek grinned. “Damien told them where you were. He hired them to steal from you, to make you desperate so you’d work for him.”
“That’s impossible,” she rasped.
Rezek made a disappointed tsking noise. “This is what happens when you put your fate in the hands of people like him. They use you.”
Kyvin withdrew a small, sharp knife from a belt at his waist, and something old and familiar simmered to life inside her. Something she thought she’d destroyed.
Fear.
“Now, then,” Rezek said in a low, dangerous voice. “I suggest you don’t make me repeat myself.”
As Kyvin grazed the point of the blade along her collarbone, Ari met Rezek’s cold eyes and lifted her head. His words were poison, and she would not let them weaken her. Even if what he said was true, she would not bend. She would hear it from Damien’s own mouth before she condemned him.
And she would tell Rezek nothing.
Kyvin pressed the point of the blade into the spot just below her bone with a grin. “Scream for me, little mouse.”
CHAPTER 34
MIKIRA
MIKIRA DIDN’T KNOW what she was doing.
She and Reid had barely reached the landing outside the ballroom in time to see Talyana haul Damien off. Reid had gone after them to the Anthir headquarters, and she’d sought Ari, but unable to find her, assumed the girl had gone with Reid. She’d returned to the manor, and for several long minutes, simply stood outside Damien’s door in a daze.
The world felt vast with possibilities. Her best friend had returned to her, only to manipulate and use her. Her sponsor was implicated in murder and had been arrested because of her foolishness. The final race for her family’s fate began a day from now, and everything was falling apart around her.
That was why she’d come here. She wanted to see if she could find any more evidence, because she’d finally remembered where she’d seen the corpse’s face: he was one of the men the Anthir had come looking for all those weeks ago. Still, she found it suspicious that this had happened after she told Rezek about Damien’s fake ring. Had he orchestrated it somehow?
She rifled through Damien’s desk, then his room, then stopped on the threshold of Reid’s. It was not full of caskets like she’d thought all those weeks ago. Rather, it was the neat, orderly space of a soldier, or perhaps a mother hen, and it smelled of tea and paper. Directly across stood a four-poster bed, the dark navy comforter and sheets meticulously pressed. She’d drifted toward it before she realized what she was doing, her fingers brushing along the soft cotton, before she retracted her hand.
Scowling at herself, she quickly checked the nightstands and closet before moving on to the adjacent workroom. A narrow desk spread the length of the wall, stacked with neat piles of books and papers. Above hung an arrangement of drawings. The bones of the leg, the veins of the hand, the muscles of the lower back—they spread across the wall in charcoal and ink, precise, detailed, and methodically annotated.
She sifted through the stacks of papers but found only research and more anatomy diagrams. Careful to put everything back, she moved along the desk, but the only notable thing she found was a pile of thin glass packets whose purpose she couldn’t discern. One was cracked and stained inside with ink, the others intact but with a tiny, needle-sized hole in the ends for loading the ink.
Her elbow brushed a stack of folders, sending one sliding across the table. Papers spilled out and she paused with her hand outstretched to gather them back. These weren’t anatomical drawings.
She took in the curve of her own face, the hawklike bend to her nose, and the smattering of freckles across her face. Spreading the drawings out, she found one of her racing on Atara, another of her sitting by the fire with a cup of tea. The last showed a walk she and Reid had gone on after the second race—she recognized it because he’d drawn her clothes in exact detail, her hair still in Ari’s complex braid.
A thought pulled at her, like a glimpse of something out the corner of her eye. It rocked through her in waves of guilt and gusts of understanding.
Unable to look at the drawings any longer, she stuffed them hurriedly back into the folder, and picked up a scrap of paper she’d missed. It read I have a lead on the prince.
“Mikira?”
She whirled about, crumpling the paper in her hand.
Reid stood in the doorway, his skin flush from exertion. “What are you doing in here?”
She opened her mouth and found no words. Lying had never been her strong suit, and the sheer open confusion with which Reid was staring at her drove back any attempt she might have made.
“I needed to know,” she said at last. “About Damien. I needed to know who I was working with.”
Understanding shuttered Reid’s expression. “You’re spying.”
“I’m not! I’m looking for answers for myself.” And she was—she just hadn’t decided what to do if she found them. Once, she wouldn’t have hesitated, but things had changed the last couple of months. She had changed, and she wasn’t sure if she recognized herself any longer.
Reid stepped toward her. “Did Talyana put you up to this?”
The accusation sparked something inside her: a hot mess of indignation and guilt. She felt like a traitor. The look in Reid’s eyes said she was one. “I don’t work for Talyana. I didn’t know what she was! Unlike you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means how can you be friends with someone like him, Reid?” She thrust a hand toward Damien’s room.
Reid’s jaw set. “I know the person underneath.”
“The murderer?”
“My friend!” he snapped. “The person that gave me a home and a purpose when mine were taken from me.” He ran his hand through his hair, the wild mess of it matching the look in his eyes. “The Kelbras pushed my parents out of their house and into the streets, all because their land could grow verillion. And because we resisted them, the Kelbras made sure my parents wouldn’t find work anywhere. They starved, Kira. When Damien found me, I was alone and dying on the street, and he gave me—” Reid broke off, his jaw clenching.
“He gave me everything,” he said tightly. “Because he understood what it was to have something you care about ripped away from you. And he’s done the same thing for countless other people, you and Ari included, and this is how you repay him?”
The question prodded at her like a hot poker. Damien had told her that he wanted to make Enderlain a better place, and she’d believed him. She still did. He’d done more for her than almost anyone, and because of that, she’d ignored the rumors, ignored the possibility that Talyana might be right about him. Even now, she didn’t want to condemn him without inescapable proof, but she drew the line at enabling murder.
She withdrew the ring from her pocket. “I didn’t know who she was,” she said. “I thought she was my friend.”
Reid stared at the glittering ring in her palm. She watched the last of his reserve break. “You told her.”
“No matter what he’s done for you, it doesn’t make what else he does right,” she whispered, no longer sure who she was trying to convince. She couldn’t ignore what she’d seen. She couldn’t just close her eyes. But she wanted to, more than anything.
Reid reached for the ring. She nearly pulled back, but he plucked it from her palm. “You have no idea what he’s done.” He turned his back on her. “Just go home, Mikira.”
The words felt like a slap in the face. The walls she’d built around herself, the ones that had slowly crumbled the last few weeks, rose once more. She let them cut her off, let them seal her away, and fled into the lavender-scented night, seeking the one place she could think of that felt safe.
Atara welcomed her with a hot huff of air as Mikira slid into her stall. She threw her arms about the horse’s neck, holding fast and holding still as the world spiraled out of control around her.
Reid would tell Damien she couldn’t be trusted. He wouldn’t stop her from riding in the Illinir—too much rested on her winning—but what about after? Would he keep her share of the money? Ruin what remained of her family’s business? Damien Adair was not known for his forgiveness.
And the look in Reid’s eyes—the betrayal.
Mikira released Atara, falling back against the wall and sliding to the ground. She hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in them, struggling to make sense of things she didn’t understand.
A soft nose brushed the side of her face, and she looked up into Atara’s knowing gaze. The horse dropped her head, and Mikira leaned her forehead against hers like she used to with Iri, and for the first time in a long time, she let herself break.
* * *
IT WAS LATE by the time she arrived home to find Ailene and Nelda laughing by the fire. The color had returned to her sister’s face, and the aroma of Nelda’s cooking wafted from the kitchen. The scene felt like a bubble, as though if she walked in, it would pop and send everything tumbling to the floor.
The thread between her and her family had frayed in recent years, creating a distance between them made of missing people and faded memories. It’d led her to resent herself the way you resented a wounded limb for hurting. It’d left her alone, and in that isolation, she’d turned to the only thing she had left: her anger. She’d wrapped herself in it like armor, told herself she needed no one.
But as much as she’d tried to fight it, her time with Ari, Reid, and even Damien had been like a candle against the dark. It’d eaten away at that loneliness, until she’d felt more a part of something than she’d been in ages.
Now she’d ruined that too.
Mikira stared at the closed door of her father’s study, wishing desperately he were on the other side, until a heavy rapping on the front door startled her. She hadn’t moved from the foyer, rainwater dripping into a growing puddle at her feet.
The knock came again. “Anthir! Open up!”
“Kira?” Nelda appeared in the drawing room arch.
“Stay there,” Mikira ordered before opening the door.
“We have a warrant of search,” said the foremost constable, and before Mikira could protest, they filed inside and dispersed like seeds in the wind.
Talyana was the last to enter, her crisp blue and silver jacket looking out of place in their dimly lit foyer. Her plaited hair fell over her shoulder in a long tail.
Fury rose inside Mikira like a rearing horse. “What is this?”
Talyana winced. “Can we speak in private?”
Mikira stomped toward her father’s study, Talyana on her heel. She hesitated only briefly outside the closed door before throwing it open. For a moment, she simply stood there, the smell of a room long neglected making her heart twist.
The day Rezek took her father away, she’d closed the door and locked the place from her mind, unable to face any little reminder of him. Now moonlight bathed the study, illuminating the chair pushed away from the desk as though he’d left in a hurry, the surface still buried beneath a layer of papers and books. He’d spent many of his nights submerged in words, often reading to Mikira and her sisters about faraway lands and creatures they could scarcely imagine.
A note with her name sat on the desk. Mikira snatched it up and unfolded it, finding a short message in her father’s looping hand:
Kira,
I know you will have so many questions, most of which I cannot answer. I hope this can. Take care of it.
Love,
Your Father
She flipped it over, but there was nothing else. What was she supposed to take care of, the letter? Carefully, she folded it back up and tucked it in her pocket, alongside the note she’d taken from Reid’s room.
“I missed this place.” Talyana’s gaze traveled the room, taking in the bookcases and art depicting foreign landscapes and beasts.
A smile curled her lips at the worn rug by the fire, where they’d once sat together while her father told them about the sea serpents supposedly descended from Lyzairin, or about the great instruments off the Yaroyan coast that made music with the sea winds.
“Your father knew so much,” she said. “I remember—”
Mikira rounded on her. “Enough.” She couldn’t listen to her speak of the past. The past had teeth and claws, and it would tear her apart if she let it. “What lie did you come up with to get that warrant?”
Hurt flashed briefly across Talyana’s face, but she recovered quickly. “Not a lie, per se.” Her eyes drifted to a sketch of a pair of desert lizards, the pouches of their throats bright red with growing flame. “I suggested you might have evidence in the case I’m building against Damien Adair.”
“Which is a lie.”
Talyana looked back to her, her face half cast in shadow. “Is it?”
Mikira shook her head, unable to find words. Talyana was putting her family in danger by asking this.
“What does he have on you?” Talyana asked, and Mikira nearly laughed. All Damien had was what she’d willingly given him. The truth of that nearly broke her. To free herself from one noble’s grip, she’d tied herself to another, and somehow during the last two months, she’d actually grown attached to the damned man. Was she that desperate for connection?
“Like you care.” Her voice was a low rasp. “You lied to me. You used me.”
“I didn’t mean to, Kira.” Talyana bit her lip. “You were a casualty I didn’t intend.”
“Is that what this is to you? A war?”
Talyana closed the space between them. “This city is a cesspool of corruption and greed. Did you know just last month, Lady Dramara evicted a family for refusing to work in her factories? And the Kelbras have begun targeting refugees with verillion? So yes, I am waging war on this city’s elite, Kira.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She wasn’t against what Talyana was doing, but when it came to Damien, she couldn’t just divest herself of the situation. They were bound.
Mikira peered at Talyana, the glow of the moon lighting her from behind, and saw a person who had changed. All this time, Mikira had been treating her like the girl she’d grown up with, but Talyana wasn’t that person anymore, and neither was Mikira.
Talyana took her hand, her palm rough with calluses like Mikira’s own. Her heat ate away at the ice settling in Mikira’s veins, and she wanted so badly to lean into it, to let Talyana’s arms encircle her, a barrier against the breach.
“Give me the ring, Kira,” she said softly.
Mikira’s lips curled in grim satisfaction. “I don’t have it.”
Talyana’s eyes widened, and then Nelda’s frightened voice called from the doorway, “Kira? Kira they’re tearing everything apart.”
Mikira ripped her hand free. “It’s time for you to leave.”
“Kira—”
“Now!” Her fingers found one of her knives, and Talyana recoiled, but Mikira didn’t care. She’d torn a hole in Mikira’s carefully constructed armor without caring that she’d made her bleed.
Talyana retreated into the foyer. “People like the Adairs are rotting this kingdom from the inside out. You could help me stop them.” Something cold and hard settled in her gaze. “Or you can go down with him. Because I will bring him down, Mikira, and I’ll take everyone on his side down with him.”
Talyana slipped out the front door along with her constables, the rush of rain against the gravel drive swallowing up the sound of their departure.
CHAPTER 35
ARIELLE
ARI KEPT HER promise to herself—she didn’t tell Rezek a thing.
But she did scream.
Kyvin knew the most sensitive places to cut, the pain making her so dizzy that she couldn’t tell if she was still screaming or if it was just the echoes of her shrieks inside her head. But she kept their secrets.
They’d left her alone in the dark. Kyvin had released the chains so that her toes brushed the ground. Pain radiated through her, blood sliding down her skin. Her throat felt ragged from yelling and her head pounded.
You will survive, promised the voice. You will rage.
I will die here, she thought back. I will break.
Be strong, little lion.
She didn’t know how long she hung there. It could have been hours or days. Had the Illinir finished? Had Damien freed himself and left her here to die?
She flinched at every sound. Shied away at every hint of light. Only the voice kept her company, muttering a quiet litany of promises that soothed her. Without it, fear was her only companion. Fear, and the knowledge that when they came back, she would break, and she hated them for it. For taking away her carefully wrought power, for breaking her down to flesh and bone and terror.
We will make them regret every cut, soothed the voice, and Ari clung to it. We will make them afraid.
Noises scratched through the darkness. Bone-deep growls, high-pitched inhuman keens, and pained groans. She shut her eyes against them and told herself she was imagining them, but then she thought about a cold knife against her skin, of Kyvin’s empty eyes, of the knowledge that even if she made it through this agony, there would be another waiting.
