Chapter 26

Istep back from the balustrade, trembling hands outstretched, like they will somehow shield me from the scene.

Cainon takes my wrist, turns me to face him, and I gasp when he places a longbow in my hand, staring at the lofty arc of polished wood.

A terrible awareness blooms beneath my ribs …

“Do you know how to shoot one?”

The harsh cut of his voice spurs the storm in my stomach, and I look up into his uncomfortably earnest eyes. My gaze flicks to a big metal bowl set on a stone pedestal beside me, brimming with flaming oil, then to the arrows and their fluffy, flammable tips.

The heavy weight of dread fills me, shoving the air from my lungs and leaving little room for me to breathe.

“I—”

Fuck.

I give him a tight nod, and a pleased smile grazes his lips. He checks the ties at each end of the bow caught in my white-knuckled fist.

Barely seeing them, I scan the crush of people pouring into the square while the tempest churning inside me devastates my nerves and threatens to power up my throat. Fissures weave across my crystal domes, releasing wispy tendrils of tangled emotion that crawl up the sides of my chest.

“I can’t—”

“Don’t worry,” Cainon coos. “Nobody will dare snicker if you miss.”

“No, I mean I can’t do this, Cainon.” I shove the bow at him, letting go. It wobbles for a bit before he snatches it, slashing a glance across the crowd. “I can’t—won’t light that pyre.”

He pours over me like a menacing statue, making the space feel too small.

Too cramped.

My heart labors as he leans in, the tips of his fingers brushing my cheek with his too-hot touch, his anger a violent swell lashing me in waves. “I smelled you on him, you know.” The words blow up my heart rate, scaling my skin like thistles. “Smelled the remnants of Vanth’s … desire locked within the fibers of his clothing after he was detained for almost murdering you.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying …”

Silence stretches, his brows knitting together as he looks down at me with a crushing sort of finality. “They need to see that you’re mine. They don’t touch what’s mine, Orlaith. Not unless they want to die.” Again, his fingers skim my cheek, traverse my lips. “And if you don’t take the first shot, you’ll be seen as welcoming his crude attention. And perhaps you were. How do I know you weren’t begging him to fuck you?”

My breath flees. “I— I wasn’t—”

His eyes harden like flints, a darkness toiling within their depths. “Prove it,” he bites out, wrapping my fingers around the bow, those two words stoning me over and over … shackling me to this nightmare.

This hell.

I swallow a surge of violent words, and my heart bolts as he cups my cheek, tips my head, and shifts my hair, gaze darting to that ravaged spot on my neck. Cainon rumbles, pummeling me with brutal, bloody promises.

Prove it …

I want to stretch out those words and twist them into a twine to tighten around his throat. Watch his eyes bulge as he begs me for mercy—

A bell tolls, ringing out across the crowd, snapping me from my violent reverie. Cainon drops his hand but remains close, his body a scouring heat against mine as we turn our attention to the pyre.

A squire climbs onto its base, dressed in a blue tunic, stockings, and a leather belt. He has a feather in his hat that flits in the hot, humid breeze.

He unrolls a white scroll, then begins to read aloud, his baritone easily carried across the hushed crowd. “Vanth Augustine, Second of His Name, has been convicted of grievous crimes against the High Master’s promised.”

“Remember, you’re only sparking the match,” Cainon murmurs into my ear, and it’s a battle not to squirm away from his barbed breath. “It will mean so much to me.”

My legs threaten to buckle, and I’m forced to lean against the balustrade.

“For his misdeeds,” the squire continues, “he has been sentenced to death by fire! Shunned in life, so too shall he be shunned in death.”

“Shunned in death!” The crowd roars the words to the haunting beat of drums. “Shunned in death!”

I don’t want to be here, drawing on the smell of sweat and fear, watching a crowd jeer for blood. I want to be in my rose garden, dragging my fingers across flushes of bold blooms, admiring their depth of color.

“Shunned in death!”

I want to be sodden and salty, stretched out on the black-stone beach, the sun on my face as Kai churns through the waves—always watching.

Always close.

“Shunned in death!”

I want to be in Rhordyn’s Den, curled beneath the covers and surrounded by walls of black, sleeping away the day.

Hiding from the world.

Cainon steps behind me, and I can feel the frantic pace of his pounding heart, his hard, throbbing manhood pressed against me.

He’s … enjoying this.

“He needs to suffer,” Cainon grates out, his voice carved with a menacing lilt.

“Shunned in death!”

I can’t think, can’t speak, can hardly breathe as I scan the wild crowd, some with an upside-down v carved into their foreheads.

Their fists punch the sky every time they bellow the vile words.

I catch sight of a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and bold blue eyes that spear right through me, and my cheeks heat with a flare of shame. I break Gun’s stare, looking down at Zane tucked close to his side, draped in the cloak I bought him. Watching me with wide eyes, like he doesn’t recognize me.

Neither of them are chanting.

My throat swells, and I rip my gaze away, blinking back tears. The bell tolls again, and the crowd becomes silent, though the drums continue to beat.

Cainon places his hands over mine, urging me to lift the bow. Forcing me to look down the line of the unarmed weapon to where Vanth is trussed up a hundred feet away, his eyes now bulging with unmistakable fear.

Cainon points toward a lump of hay. “Shoot right there. It’ll ignite the pyre’s base, and he’ll burn nice and slow.”

His words are the smell of scorched flesh torn from the past, presented to me like a gift. They’re more death pinned against my already haunted conscience.

A terrible tremble rattles me from the inside out …

“You’ve done much worse,” he purrs, creating more fissures in my domes.

Spawning more sprouts of crippling emotion.

“This will be a breeze compared to stabbing someone through the heart at close range.”

I swear the ground softens beneath my feet, my hands now coated in his blood as I watch him slip away.

Fall backward into a frothy waterfall.

It’s an effort not to sob. To split apart and scream.

I step from tragedy to tragedy, toting death like tombstones collecting beneath my ribs. And I realize with heartbreaking finality that I got the wrong monster in that jungle.

I got the wrong one.

“Don’t be nervous.” Planting a kiss on my cheek, Cainon shifts toward the stack of arrows, plucks one up, then swipes the bandaged tip through the fire. A churn of flames swallows the bind of white material, and a collective gasp echoes from the crowd.

A sea of eyes turn to me as Cainon helps me notch the arrow, and a woman somewhere howls—a coarse, throaty sound that curdles my blood.

I don’t look in that direction. Don’t want to see who that haunting eddy belongs to. Vanth may have done a terrible thing, but he’s still a son. A brother.

Perhaps a promised.

My chest becomes so crowded with wild weeds of emotion that each breath feels choked, and I struggle to remember the reasons why I’m biting down on words like crunching glass. Why I’m wrestling my morals into a wrangled knot while I wear the stoic face of a woman I’m beginning to hate.

The little red-haired girl still caged in that burrow—the way she flinched when I reached between the bars and cupped her cheeks.

The male lying dead on the ground, his flat stare seeking the shaft of moonlight spearing down from above.

A terrible realization settles upon my shoulders …

I have no choice. I have to sow more death into my already sullied conscience.

I have to play the fucking part.

I drop inside myself, gather a wobbling stack of crystal shells, then begin untangling the mangled mess of my emotions trailing through the patchy carcasses of my untended domes. I corral them back where they belong, slam new domes into place, then pull a deep, shuddering inhale.

Breathe, Orlaith. Find a quiet place inside and chase the silence.

Baze’s words come to me from the past, and I steady my grip on the weapon, lifting it, looking down the line of the arrow and past the blazing tip. My gaze doesn’t land on Vanth but on a broad-shouldered male in the crowd behind him swathed in a royal-blue cloak, arms crossed and face hidden within the shadow of his hood.

My heart leaps, then stumbles over a foray of frantic beats.

I don’t have to see his features to know who it is. To remember the torment roiling within his eyes before I turned my back and left him lying on the sand, broken and beaten with his scars on display, desperately trying to cover himself.

Baze …

Part of me wants to run to him. To beg him to drag me away from this hell, kicking and clawing at his skin while I struggle to scream—because he knows better.

He always does.

The rest of me wants to tuck into a ball and hide from the man who taught me how to use a bow, now watching me point one at a person trussed against a log with a wet patch blooming at his crotch.

“Your hands are shaking …”

Cainon’s voice pierces my thoughts, and I’m reminded that there’s a predator standing behind me. A predator Baze has a prickly history with.

I should have your head for that, boy.

My insides flinch at the chilling echo of Cainon’s words—almost a promise.

One wrong move could spur Baze to do something stupid that draws attention to himself. Gets him hurt.

Killed.

That sizzling darkness slithers free of the chasm inside my chest, and I feel it worming beneath my skin like fiery eels. A deadly promise of its own.

Swallowing, I straighten my shoulders and lift my chin, shifting my gaze back to the pyre. If I pretend he’s not here, not watching, then I won’t draw any attention to him. I won’t have to look myself in the eye and see how much I’ve changed.

See the monster I’ve become.

“Orlaith?”

“I’m fine,” I say—a pretty lie for my poisonous, shameful truth.

Cainon steps to the side, and I pull my arm farther back, the fletching brushing my ear. The flaming tip dances in the wind, my hair doing the same as I catch Vanth’s wide, aching stare.

His lips move, muttering something overshadowed by the woman’s howling screams.

I fail to force my heart to slow, remembering the broken look in Vanth’s eyes after he shot his brother through the heart. The way he drank from that bottle of liquor as though he truly believed it was going to burn the blood off his hands.

I remember the way he growled at me to scream—like my own pain was the only remedy for his own.

He’s suffered enough.

I lift my aim a smidge, threading a breath between my parted lips. I close my eyes, find a small sliver of silence tucked beneath my ribs, and release the string.

The arrow loosens, and I hear the distant thud, followed by a hush that blankets the crowd.

The howling stops, the only sound now the roar of my own blood gushing through my ears as I slam more shells atop my crumbling crystal domes.

“You missed.”

I open my eyes.

Vanth’s head is slumped forward, a blossom of blood swelling from where my arrow protrudes from his heart.

No, I didn’t …

There is no dousing surge of relief for the fire in my veins. No breath of fresh air that can clear the rotten filth from my lungs.

Tears well in my eyes, but I refuse to let them spill, slamming another shell atop the dome containing my flourishing self-disgust.

I look up at Cainon who’s clutching the rail, chewing his lip. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he mutters, taking the bow. In a few swift motions he’s snatched another arrow, set it alight, notched it, and then it’s whizzing through the air so fast it’s impossible to trace. It lands amongst the straw, and a violent burst of flames lick up the side of the pyre. Up Vanth’s legs.

His body.

The smell of burning flesh hits, and it’s an effort not to fold forward and vomit as I force myself to watch his skin bubble and blister, blacken and melt, until all that’s left are his charred remains and a swirl of ash on the wind.

* * *

Cainon speaks with one of the guards below the podium while I stand beside the balustrade, fingers wrapped around the railing, bits of ash littering my dress and hair.

Drifting through my torpid insides.

I watch the thinning crowd, hunting a dark-blue cloak and a rebellious dash of sandy hair. Perhaps Zane feels my gaze on him because he finally turns, glancing up at me when his uncle stops to have a word with someone.

My heart leaps into my throat.

I unlatch the reticule from around my wrist and tuck it between two railing rungs, desperation widening my eyes.

He frowns but gives me a terse nod.

Pure, unguarded relief floods my veins, and I well up from the force of it, clearing my throat as I offer him a tight smile.

If anyone else were to notice the bag and pluck it from its hiding spot, they’d find it empty.

But Zane …

He’ll scope the lining, find the small slit in the side, then worm his fingers down and feel the folded notes I tucked within. One a placation, the other a plea—a note I pray makes it into his uncle’s hands soon because I’m running out of time.

Cainon assists me down the stairs, and I’m boosted back onto the horse. A blow of wind wails through the lofty buildings, playing with the tendrils of my dress, lifting my hair off my neck just as Cainon climbs up behind me and settles me between his thighs.

But my attention isn’t on the man at my back, wrapped around me like the bars of a prison cell. It’s on Baze standing amongst the crowd.

Though his face is cast in shadow, I can feel the hot rake of his stare upon the bite mark as I hurriedly pull my hair back down to hide it. I feel that same stare scrape across my wrist, my cupla, like he sees it for the shackle it is.

He begins weaving through the crowd, shoving people aside in his haste.

Charging toward me.

My heart thrashes so hard and fast I’m certain I’m going to be sick, eyes widening with a silent plea.

I shake my head ever so slightly.

No, Baze.

No—

He doesn’t still, doesn’t even slow, drawing almost close enough for me to leap through the air and land in his arms. He’s about to push free of the crowd when Cainon kicks the horse forward, catapulting us down the path so hard and fast I’m shoved against his chest.

He weaves his arm around my waist, tucking me close, and I want to feel repulsed. Want to sit in that feeling until it seeps through my skin and rots me to the core. But I can’t feel anything beyond this wild fear wrestling inside my chest …

Baze saw.