She couldn’t face him. Wasn’t ready to. Not after everything he’d done. Not when she was just starting to feel like a form of herself again.
Beside her, Kestrel was watching though. Hopeful and expectant. Elora couldn’t bring herself to let her down.
Elora fixed her expression with ice and faced her former torturer. “Darius?”
He winced at the bite in her tone but nodded as if to say he accepted it. Deserved it. She wanted to scream that he deserved that and so much more, but she would try to be civil for Kestrel’s sake.
“I know it can’t mean much, given all I’ve done to you, but I wanted you to know that I’ve spent the last twenty years regretting it.” He struggled to maintain eye contact, those liquid night pupils of his dodging this way and that. But he kept forcing himself to return to her gaze. To try to face her. “Back then, I didn’t question things. I didn’t use my own head. That’s not to try to excuse my actions, I know I hurt you in ways that are unspeakable…and I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
The last words struck her like dragon’s fire. Burning. Warming. Threatening to both comfort and consume her.
She didn’t know—hadn’t realized—how much she had needed to hear it. Words that she still wasn’t ready to accept openly, but ones that she could feel chipping away at the icy shards around her heart.
Hanging his head, Darius continued. “I wish I had half the backbone that Kestrel has, that her mother had. Half the sense of justice and human decency, so that I would’ve recognizedwhat I was doing was wrong, and I would’ve stopped it sooner. Set you free, perhaps. Or…I don’t know. Done something.” He shook his head, caught in an internal argument with himself. “I don’t know, maybe that’s not the full truth. Because I did know what I was doing was wrong. It’s why I tried to make your suffering quick. Why I always volunteered to be the one in charge because I knew the others were so much more ruthless with you because of who you were, what you represented.”
It was all flooding back to her.
The endless beatings.
The stabbings.
The strangulation.
So much pain, and yet death would never come for her, only a loss of consciousness. And when she would come back to, she would still be trapped in that dark cell, hailstone chains around her wrists much like they still were now.
She hated him for it.
Hated every single Caeloran who had ever lived.
But something about what he was saying reigned true for her as well. Even then, she recognized how much harder he would strike her, how quickly she would succumb to incapacitation at his hands. At the time though, she had always assumed it was because he was the most brutal. The deadliest. But could what he was saying be true? Had it been a mercy? The other torturers certainly had drawn out her suffering, sometimes making her scream and beg for days for them to stop.
“Not that I’m trying to say I was a saint or anything,” he continued. “I didn’t stop them. I blindly obeyed my orders because I was too much of a coward back then.”
Sometimes she felt the same. Had Queen Signe not instructed her to connive a way into Princess Kestrel’s good graces? Had Elora not blindly, willingly obliged, simply for fear of what refusing would mean for her own freedom?
But this was years of torment they were talking about. Not a few days.
Yet…part of her could see where he was coming from. Part of her wanted to see him in a different light. It felt like a gentle hand over her heart, something that had the power to heal what had long-since been shattered.
The whole conversation left her skin itchy and aching. She wasn’t ready to heal. Wasn’t ready to forgive. That would make her weak and pathetic, vulnerable to future pain—because who in their right mind would believe the sappy apology flowing from their former torturer’s lips?
His next words shook her even more thoroughly. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, or any ounce of kindness from you, so I won’t ask for it. But I know you helped Kestrel come and see me, and for that I am grateful. And that must mean the two of you are friends. And so, although you don’t owe me a thing, I’ll ask this anyway: please look after her.”
That was all he wanted to ask of her? An Ashen Princess. The future Queen of Irongate.
He could’ve begged for his freedom. For a swift execution—since they both knew it was coming to that, regardless of Kestrel’s hopes to save him.
Not a ploy for his own life. Not a trick to lure her into trusting and releasing him.
All he wanted was for his daughter to be safe.
That, more than anything, melted the icy walls surrounding Elora’s heart.
He cleared his throat, this time addressing Kestrel one last time. “I kept you sheltered. And I worry I didn’t do the best to prepare you for how this cruel world works.”
Kestrel’s voice was thick with tears. “You did fine—I’m doing fine. I’m figuringthings out.”
But he seemed unconvinced. He fixed his gaze on Elora again, a silent question hanging in the air between them.
