Chapter 52

My fingers ache with the crush of my hands, strangling nothing, swinging at my side with each stoning step. I whip one back, then punch my fist through a tree trunk, shredding the skin on my knuckles.

The ancient thing splinters, groaning, then tips like a felled giant, quaking the ground as it assaults the jungle floor and rips a luminous hole in the shadows.

I fall to my knees, heaving breath, trying to keep my itching skin from splitting. I tilt my head, looking through the gapped canopy, studying the smattering of stars like a hunter stalks its prey.

They want me to bend.

To break.

Well, I want them to blink out until there’s nothing up there but a sea of suffocating blackness.

“I won’t do it,” I say on a low, maniacal laugh. “I’d sooner watch the world burn.”

No response.

They’ll regret their silence soon enough, taken from someone who knows. Regret is a poison I’m forced to drink daily, but not for the right reasons. Not because I hid Orlaith from herself—I could never regret that. And if she knew why, her anger would sputter into understanding, but then I’d lose her in a heartbeat.

Forever.

I know her too well to tempt her with the truth. To admit that we’re a disaster in slow motion. Existing on a fault line destined to split.

No ...

What I regret is letting her believe she doesn’t hold my cold, crippled heart in the palm of her hand. Because she does.

She always will.