Page 48 of Too Dangerous To Die

His face is a mask of restraint—barely held together by threads of control. “I’m keeping you alive.”

“At what cost?” I hiss. “You won’t talk to me, you won’t explain the whispers, the Wraithborn, the way youlookat me like I’m both yours and your executioner?—”

“Because you are,” he says, voice low and sharp as obsidian. “You areeverythingI’ve lost. Everything I should hate. And the only thing I still want.”

The words hit like a spell.

I stumble back a step, breath catching, heart pounding like a war drum. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have left.”

Rage burns through me—rage and something worse: fear. I don’t understand him, and I don’t understandme. Not anymore. Every second I spend near him, I feel more like her. Like Medea. Like the ghost of something powerful and terrible wearing my skin.

And I don’t know if I want to stop it.

“I’m done talking to a wall,” I say, turning on my heel and storming off.

He doesn’t call after me.

He never does.

I find a fractured alcove at the edge of the ruins, where the stones slope inward like a broken cathedral. The wind howls louder now, and in the distance, thunder rolls. I sit with my knees drawn to my chest, arms wrapped tightly around them, as the first cold drops of rain hit the stone around me.

Then lightning tears across the sky.

And he’s there.

Rhaegar steps into the alcove like a shadow given form, wings slick from the rain, his eyes burning like gold fire through the dusk.

“Go away,” I whisper.

“No.”

A single word. Unshakable. I look up, and the storm behind him flickers like it knows this moment is sacred. Or cursed.

“You make me feel like I’m unraveling,” I say. “And not just the Medea part.Allof me.”

“I know.”

“You should have left me to die.”

“I couldn’t.”

The wind gusts, pushing rain into the shelter, cold and sharp against my skin. I should move. Should turn away.

But then his voice lowers. Rough. Unsteady. “Do you want to know what I found in the heart of this city?”

My heart stutters.

He steps closer.

“I found proof of what I already feared. That you—she—made a pact. With the Wraithborn. A blood oath that can’t be broken.” His voice cracks. “They think they own you.”

I breathe in sharply, every word a cut I can’t stop bleeding from.

“I’m going to sever it,” he says. “Whatever it takes.”

And then he looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time—or maybe the last.

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