Page 347 of Heat of the Everflame

“What the hell, D?” he shouted. “Let me go!”

“No. If you’re going to be a bratty younger brother, then I’ll be a bully older sister.”

I threw open the first office I came to and shoved him in. I shot a hard stare at Luther, who silently nodded and took up a post outside the door as I slammed it closed.

“You have no right,” Teller snapped.

“I have every right. I’m your Queen.”

“No, you’re not. I’m a subject of Sophos now.”

“Well I’m still your older sister, and I’m not letting you stay here.”

He threw his hands up. “I makeone choicethat’s not about you or Mother, and I can’t even have that. Haven’t I lost enough? You have to take this from me, too?”

If he’d carved my heart from my chest with his fingernails, it would have hurt less than the pain I felt at those words.

I rubbed my throat, my head hanging low. “It’s not safe here, Teller.”

“It’s safer than Lumnos. Everyone there knows my mother is the rebel leader and my sister is the traitor Queen who broke her out. I can’t go to school anymore. I can’t even leave the palace. I’m a prisoner.” He sighed and turned toward a window that looked out over the city. “At least in Sophos, no one knowswho I am. I’m just another mortal here to study.” His expression hardened. “Or I was, until that scene you just made.”

I winced. “Mortals aren’t as safe here as they seem. There are things about this place you don’t know.”

He laughed harshly. “Of course. More secrets.”

“Tel, can we please just talk? I know I promised to bring Mother home, and I failed. You have every right to be angry—”

“That’s not why I’m angry.”

I paused. “It isn’t?”

“I’m mad because youlied.” He fixed me with a cold glare that felt nothing like the brother I knew. “Before you left, I asked you if there was anything else you were keeping from me, and you swore there wasn’t.”

“That was the truth. I told you everything.”

“Then why did I have to find out from Remis Corbois that the Sophos Crown invited me to study heremonthsago?”

Shit.Shit.

The offer the Sophos representatives had made at my Ascension Ball.

“Gods... I completely forgot.”

He flinched back. “You forgot?My dream comes true, the one thing I’ve been working for my entire life, and you not only keep it from me, you don’t even remember?” He couldn’t have looked more disgusted with me if he’d tried. “Is that how little I matter to you?”

My chest squeezed tight with a crushing pressure. The air felt thicker, harder to breathe.

“You’re the most important person in the world to me. I would do anything for you.”

“Except tell me the truth.”

I grimaced. I deserved that.

“You’re right. I made a bad choice, and I let you down. I had my reasons, but...” I shook my head miserably. “None of them excuse not telling you. I’m really, really sorry.”

He crossed the room and stood in front of me, folding his arms over his chest with a frown.

I was taken aback by how tall he loomed. My Descended blood made me taller than most mortal men, but Teller had outgrown me some time ago. He was so often at a desk hunched over a book, I rarely noticed it. He wasn’t my baby brother anymore—his body was filling out, all the soft roundness of youth chiseling into the sharp angles of a man.

---