Page 12 of The Throne's Undoing

Three.

Exhale.

Four.

Five--

"I saidagain!" he spat.

Kallie wiped the bead of sweat from her forehead. Every muscle cried out for her to take a rest. But she couldn't until she had proven herself--until she had shown her father what she could do.

On trembling limbs, Kallie pushed off the floor and wiped the sweat from her palms onto her trousers. Then she ran, head-first. Her arms pumped at her sides as she weaved through the obstacle course the king had built beneath the castle.

"Faster!" the king shouted. Although Kallie could no longer see him because of the walls of the maze, she heard his words clearly enough, as if he were beside her.

She ran faster.

She ran harder.

She dove as the triggered arrows came for her, biting back tears as an arrow whizzed by too close to her head.

Kallie gasped,her eyes shooting open.

The waterfall of the Whispering Springs roared, a rush of noise filling her ears. But the sound of the water was not the reason for her body growing more numb by the minute. It wasn't the reason her hands trembled or her teeth chattered. Neither was it the reason for the buzzing that filled her head.

No, it was the person sitting cross-legged atop one of the boulders at the edge of the small lake--the man who should not have been there at all.

Kallie knew in every bone in her body that her brother was dead. However, Fynn looked just as alive as the night they were on the ship before everything went wrong. Before Sebastian and his crew surrounded him and slaughtered him.

His brown hair was disheveled as if he had been running his hands through it incessantly, a habit not unlike him. His clothes were as immaculate as always, perfectly pressed with his collar angled. A smirk plastered across his face. Yet when she met his deep brown eyes, a chilling emptiness caused her to shiver despite the brilliant, warm sun overhead.

"I don't understand," Kallie whispered, her body shaking and her feet sinking into the sand. She wrapped her arms around herself.

Fynn sighed and raked his fingers through his chestnut waves. "That's because you do not wish to hear the truth."

"No," she argued. "I already know the truth. My father--"

"Is a liar," Fynn said, interrupting. "He has been manipulating you, sister. He never cared about your well-being, only what you could provide him."

"You're wrong," she spat, nails biting into the sides of her arms as she squeezed herself tight.

None of this made sense.

Not Fynn being here, not this lucid dream that felt all too real.

Nothing her brother said made sense--not the words he claimed to be true--the words attempting to unwrite her story, tangling what she once thought true. Fynn claimed that her father was not to be trusted and was not the person she believed him to be--that he did not care about her.

But her brother was wrong, so incredibly wrong.

Kallie pressed her palms against her temples and rocked back and forth. Her chest tightened with each loud thud of her heart. Her breaths grew more shallow as her lungs constricted and the world threatened to close in around her.

Her father would never lie to her.

He would never betray her.

Kallie couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. She couldn't make sense of anything anymore.

As hot tears burned the back of her eyes, she coughed, trying to clear her throat and steady her racing heart. However, as she inhaled, smoke filled her lungs and only made the shaking worse as she tried and failed to breathe in fresh air.

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