Page 80 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

“You aren’t ‘just’ anything. You were his Heir. You were the most dangerous person in the world to him. And I think he was terrified of you because of it.”

It sounded unbelievable.Absurd.

“Lookat this.”

I leapt to my feet, thrusting my hand out to the view of Lahor below us—this dead, pathetic, broken city, a mere ghost of what it once was.

Just like me.

Raihn had taken half a step back, and I realized, dimly, that Nightfire now engulfed my hands, blazing up my arms. I noticed this very distantly, as if I was standing far outside my body.

“Lookat what he did to this place,” I ground out. “He killed dozens of people the day he left. He killed children he partially raised. Children that didn’t even truly pose a threat to him. Just because he was that fuckingthorough.”

It is important to be thorough and cautious, little serpent.

How many times had he said that to me?

I was talking so fast I could barely breathe, my words rough-hewn by anger. “So why would he let me live, if I was so dangerous? Why didn’t he kill me the day he found me? Instead of—instead of taking me home and lying to me for almost twenty years. Why wouldn’t he just kill me instead of caging me, instead ofbreakingme—”

Suddenly, Raihn was right in front of me, so close the Nightfire surely had to burn. If it hurt, he didn’t show it. His hands gripped my shoulders, tight.

“You are not broken.” I’d never heard him sound so furious, though his voice didn’t rise at all. “You are not broken.Oraya. Do you understand me?”

No. I didn’t. Because Iwasbroken. Just like Lahor was broken. I was just as broken as this city and its ruins and ghosts. Just as broken as Evelaena and her two-hundred-year-old scar and her twisted obsession with the man who gave it to her. What fucking right did I have to judge her for that when I was no different?

Vincent had ruined me. He had saved me. He had loved me. He had stifled me. He had manipulated me. He had made me everything that I was. Everything that I could be.

Even the greatest parts of my power, the parts he never wanted me to find, were his.

And now here I was, poring over every wound he gave me. And no matter how much they hurt, I never wanted them to heal, because they were his.

And I missed him too much to hate him the way I wanted to.

And I hated him most of all for that.

All at once, exhaustion fell over me. My flames shriveled away. Raihn still held my shoulders. He was so close that our faces were only inches apart. It would be so easy to lean forward and fall against his chest. If this was the version of him I had known in the Kejari, maybe I would have done that. Let him support me for a little while.

But it wasn’t.

“Look at me, Oraya.”

I didn’t want to. I shouldn’t. I’d see too much. He’d see too much. I should pull away from him.

Instead, I lifted my head, and Raihn’s stare, red as dried blood, nailed me to the wall.

“I spent seventy years trapped by the worst of vampire power,” he said. “And I spent so much of that time trying to make them make sense. But they don’t. Rishan. Hiaj. Nightborn. Shadowborn. Bloodborn. Hell, fucking gods. It doesn’t matter. Neculai Vasarus was—” His throat bobbed. “Evil doesn’t even cover it. And for a long time, I thought he didn’t love anything. I was wrong. He did love his wife. He loved her, and he hated that he loved her. He loved her so much he choked the life out of her.”

Raihn’s eyes had drifted far away—drifted somewhere in the past that I knew, just from the look on his face, hurt him to stare at directly.

“There’s nothing they’re more afraid of than love,” he murmured. “They’ve been taught their entire lives that every true connection is nothing but a danger to them.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?”

Because I was still stuck on this—on this idea that Vincent had been afraid of me. This idea that went against everything I had ever known.

His mouth twisted into a wry smirk. “Love is fucking terrifying,” he murmured. “I think that’s true no matter who you are.”

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