He spun me toward him, and I tried my hardest to drop my gaze to the speckled gray stone, but in the night those spots looked like dark blood frozen on the surface. My eyes instantly snapped up, locking with Tolek’s.
A wild wind whipped through the trees, and over Tolek’s shoulder, a waving branch became a hunched, decayed figure.
I flinched, clenching my eyes shut.
“Don’t run away.” Tolek stepped close enough that his heat warmed my chilled body. “Was it Malakai? Or the emblem?”
“No,” I muttered. My breath was tight in my chest. The air prickled with misty rain, curling the ends of my hair and sticking to my skin.
“Talk to me.”
“This is all my fault,” I snarled. In the distance, thunder rumbled.
“It isn’t?—”
“Don’t tell me it isn’t because it is, Tolek! Everyone—my father, the council, countless soldiers and allies—have died because of this curse, and tonight, I watched more people nearly die for it, too! I watched—and?—”
Malakai’s back flashed before my eyes. Mora’s ruined shoulder. The bloodied staff from Lancaster’s side.
And Jezebel, with those tendrils of Angellight choking her. Squeezing tighter, tighter.
“This is bigger than you, Alabath. This isbiggerthan all of us.”
“And we’realllosing.” The words were rough. “How long until one of us loses everything?”
“We aren’t going to lose everything.”
“We are puppets for the Angels, Tolek. We are their toys and their weapons.” I sucked in a breath, pressing my hand to my mouth to hold in an angry sob. “They’re loading their bows with warriors as sharpened arrows and aiming us at their targets. And each time, it is a solid, inarguable strike of the bullseye. All because of this agent in my blood that activated the Angelcurse and whatever prophecies were spun in the starseonsago! And why? Why is that fair?”
“It’s not fair!” He threw his arms out, stepping back as if to capture the whole mess—to contain it so I wouldn’t feel its wrath. “None of this is fair. None of the hands we’ve been dealt, none of the shit we’ve survived, is fair.”
He rushed to me, taking my face between his hands, and only then did I realize tears streamed down my cheeks, hot and angry and unquenchable. “Every damn emblem you go after, every battle you walk into, I am terrified of the most unfair outcome of all. I fear life will deal the worst hand yet, and the long string of unjust patterns will continue.”
My lips trembled as something inside of me cracked, and my throat grew too thick to speak. More and more with each word he said. But Tolek’s thumbs stroked my cheekbones with the steady confidence he always radiated.
“But do you know what I do when I’m dealt a bad hand, Alabath?”
My voice was so small as I said, “What?”
A smirk quirked one side of his lips. “I play smarter, not harder.”
“We can’t outsmart the Angels, Tolek.” I shook my head slightly in his hands.
Another stroke of his thumb across my cheek. “Where’s that confidence I love?”
“They took it. Siphoned it away with each of the dead they chased us with tonight. With each of their spirits I had to burn, they took it.”
“Alabath,” he tutted, “are you saying you doubt I can outplay the Angels? That together, we can’t tackle the eternal bastards?”
A lump formed in my throat, the battle of my heart warring to say yes—yes, I knew that together, he and I were invincible, that this love between us could forge the stars—and my head beating it down to say no.
No, we were nothing against the Angels.
No, there was more at play here.
No.
He read each of those fears in my silence. Then, one hand dropped to the small of my back, the other remaining sure against my cheek, and he pulled me a step closer. Forced me to come to him, to feel his beating heart and the certainty spilling from him.
