“I admit it took a bit. When everyone kept describing the suspect with different features, I thought it was a group of women. But then there was the timing of it. It all started when you finally began leaving your room again after Aidia died. And one night I ran into Gaven while he was out searching for you after hours.”
“FuckingGavenblew my cover.” I shake my head, but I want to cry, both because I miss him and because I’m disappointed that he lived up to my expectations.
“I protected that secret because I swear to the Divine, if our parents had known, they would have drugged you every night like Able.” He looks down at his bowl. “Did you poison my soup, Low?”
I meet his lilac eyes. “Are you telling the truth? Were you the captain of the city watch, or were you my brother?”
“I was both, Low. You’re not the only one who loved her—who lost her. You’ve been hoarding it for months. You were alone with your grief and you left me alone with mine, too. I know you can’t understand now when you’re this angry, but that day changed everything for me.”
Kellan looks wrecked. I’ve never seen him look so devastated. I turn away to ease the burn of tears in my eyes.
I can’t shoulder his grief when my own is already too heavy.
“Did you know they were going to let Rafe do that?” I ask.
“No. If I had known, I would have been there, and there hasn’t been a day in the last six months that I haven’t woken up wishing I had been. Libby had—” His voice breaks, and I turn to look at him.
His eyes are glassy with unshed tears. “Libby had a feeling something was off that whole morning, but you know how her magic is. Harvain’s whims, as she likes to say. She doesn’t always know what the foresight feelings mean or what they pertain to. She couldn’t place it until right before it happened.”
He blows out a shuddering sigh and looks away. “Low, I ran. I got here as fast as I could, but I was too late. I found you in the bushes and I thought you were gone, too.”
It’s not his fault. I’ve always known deep down that he is as much a product of my father’s violence as Aidia and I are. There’s no way he escaped the things we bore. But my parents are dead, and this fury remains, and there is no one else to rage at.
I want to break things. I want somewhere else to channel my anger, but I know that he’s telling the truth. My sister-in-law has a blessing of foresight, but it’s a tricky kind of magic to understand. The lack of clarity makes me want to curse the Divine who blessed us both. How tragic to give you glimpses of the future but not allow you to save the people you love. How heartless to make you want affection but never allow you to kiss anyone without killing them.
It’s all just a cruel Divine joke. Maybe someday I’ll be able to laugh about it, but right now, true laughter seems a distant memory.
I stand and look into Kellan’s pleading eyes. This is the most emotion I’ve seen out of him since childhood, and I’m not ready to forgive him—or maybe I just don’t know how. Maybe I never will.
“Low—” His voice is a rasp. “Did you poison my soup?”
My hands shake, and I shudder out a ragged breath as I turn away from my brother. I walk to the dining room door and pause in the threshold.
I don’t look at him as I whisper, “I did what I thought would bring me peace.”
61
HARLOW
Sitting on the boarding house window seat, I don’t feel a shred of guilt for what I’ve done. I feel more cleansed from my anger than I did from my bath.
Ever since my magic showed up twenty-five years ago, I’ve stuffed my rage down and allowed it to rot away at me.
Now that my violence is spent, and I’m alone in the quiet waiting for Henry to return to our room, all I feel is soul-deep sorrow.
Grief is not an absence. It’s a presence. I feel it in every silence, in every breath.
I’ve lived six months without the other half of my heart—so bereft that my mind fractured and summoned a world where she was still with me. Remembering is like losing her all over again.
I don’t know how to survive without this. Saving her has been my singular purpose—the last thread of hope I clung to for the last year. Without it, I’m nothing but a woman with a mind as shattered as her heart.
Killing my parents didn’t change the fact that I’ll never see Aidia’s face again. That I’ll never hear her say my name in the annoyed tone that used to make me feel triumphant. I’ll never fall asleep with her playing with my hair. And I’ll never see who she could have been living somewhere beyond the mountains, far from my parents’ control.
I’m not just mourning who she was. I’m mourning her potential. I wanted to get to know Aidia unburdened from the life that broke both of us.
And still, I know I’ll continue as I always have, putting one foot in front of the other.
To know you will always be okay alone should be comforting, but really, it’s just terribly lonely. I am so unbelievably weary.
