Page 179 of What Blooms from Death

So many impossible, dangerous things.

As she spoke, I was overcome by a storm of emotions. Shock. Anger. Doubt. But also a strange sense of relief, as questions that had been gnawing at me finally began to make sense. There was something to be said for having a clearer target to hit, I supposed.

“Five days since he fled,” Nova said, bowing her head and covering her face with a hand. “Through the Nerithys Gate, we assume. But we aren’t certain.”

Five days.

She’d been suffering for five days, while I’d been down here, useless and rotting in this godsforsaken prison.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you. I could have seen the truth about Zayn, long before now, if only I hadn’t been afraid of my magic, and I just…I…”

“They made you afraid.” The words slipped out in between my attempts to choke down sips of water.

She lifted her head away from her hand, slowly looking back at me.

My gaze fixed on her bracelets. “They put those shackles around your wrists, and they treated you as if you were something to fear. So of course you learned to be afraid.”

She didn’t argue.

A humorless laugh almost escaped me at this; we were clearly past the point of broken, if she no longer had the fire to disagree with me.

She shifted, leaning more fully into the wall and stretching her feet out before her, bracing her boots into the dust-coatedground. “I wish I could say I wasn’t afraid now, but…” Her eyes stared straight ahead at nothing. She started to reach for her face again, but seemed to lose her nerve halfway through, dropping her hand and wrapping her arms around herself instead. “But it would be a lie.”

I gathered my strength and summoned a small orb of glowing gold, so that I could better see her, and see for myself what Zayn—no,Lorien—had done to her.

Rage burned through me as the first flickers of light landed upon her newly scarred skin. I swallowed it down, forcing myself to keep inspecting the damage. Carefully, I reached toward the branching marks along her jaw.

She flinched.

I drew my hand back into a fist, magic and fury twisting in a violent dance in my gut. So much godsdamned magic and fury that, had I unleashed it in that moment, it likely would have ripped apart the entire palace and everyone in it. And I wouldn’t have fucking cared. I would have destroyed it all in my next breath—

If not for her.

Somehow, I found her gaze and I held it.

Somehow, I calmly said, “He did this to you.”

She nodded, anxiously tucking a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, only to immediately untuck them, allowing them to fall over her face and partially hide the scars. “I don’t really know how much magic he was able to steal, what I gave up, I…”

I caught her unscarred cheek as she tried to turn away. “Yougave upnothing,” I said, firmly. It seemed like the most important thing in the world right then, making certain she heard me clearly. That she was meeting my eyes as I said, “This wasn’t your fault.”

She stared at me. No—through me. Her eyes were glassy, her thoughts traveling down some path I couldn’t follow, no matterhow desperately I wanted to. Her lips parted several times before she finally managed to blink, to truly look at me again as she said, “I just want to fix all of this.”

“We will,” I replied, the words coming so fiercely, soviolentlythat they surprised even me.

For so long, I had kept up my role of the stoic, unbreakable ruler. Lesson after lesson, punishment after punishment, mission after mission. Anger served no purpose, I’d been taught. Fury was for fools. Kings endured in silence and did what was expected of them without question.

But now, I’d found something worth being furious for.

And whatever Lorien had taken from her, I was going to take it back—and then some.

Chapter Forty-Four

Nova

“Look at this,”said my brother, waving me over to him.

We were pacing along the outermost wall that surrounded the palace—one connected to the main gatehouse. It was late, though I couldn’t gauge the exact time of night, as the sky had been the same color all day: Dark, dreary grey. This dreariness had apparently washed over the palace shortly after Lorien disappeared, and it hadn’t cleared ever since. Between that and the strangely thick fog rolling across the landscape, I didn’t expect to be able to see much.

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