Page 90 of Kept to Kill
He looked bewildered, gaping at her in silence. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said at last.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Lilith.’
‘Lilith is dead,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘She was killed in the arena. I saw it myself.’ His eyes landed on Quin. ‘What game is this?’
Tears came to her eyes. He didn’t know her. ‘That wasn’t what happened,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘I couldn’t find you. I didn’t know where you were.’
A wave of grief made her hunch over, her face contorting with the pain of her memories.
‘It can’t be you,’ he said softly. ‘Lily?’
A tear ran down her cheek. ‘I wanted to find you, to tell you …’
‘Tell me what? What happened to you? I saw you slain …’ he said and fell onto his knees in front of her.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, reeling back. ‘You can’t touch me.’
Fresh tears came to her eyes. She’d hoped this day would come so that she could confess, but now that it was here, she wished she could run away from him, from all of them. She knew what she would see in their eyes once she told them what she had done. She had to tell him, all of them.
‘I killed him, Kane,’ she cried. ‘I killed Toman.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘I didn’t mean to. He was in my arms … and then he was dead, and after that … No one can touch me save Quin, Mal, and Bastian. Everyone else dies.’
Kane stared into her eyes, his own glistening with unshed tears.
‘You killed Toman?’ he asked. ‘I thought it was the Collector.’
‘He was the one who took me. He said, after Toman, he knew what I was. Whoever you saw die in the arena, it was not us. Vineri took me south that very night and there I stayed—’
‘—in Vineri’s tower until you and then the Army came,’ Quin finished for her.
Kane sat down hard on the ground. ‘We were so near to each other,’ he said. ‘If I had just walked up those tower steps, I would have found you.’
‘But you wouldn’t have known me,’ she said quietly. ‘How could you have? I am much changed from the girl you knew.’
She began to cry anew, putting her face back in her hands. She could not bear to look at him, at her unit, sure that she would see in their expressions everything she felt about herself. They now knew the worst thing she had ever done. How could Kane forgive her when she could never forgive herself?
Silence permeated the clearing until Mal finally spoke up from behind her.
‘Why did you take our Brother?’
‘You know why,’ Kane growled, looking around as if only just realizing they had an audience. He stood quickly, his face blanked of all emotion.
Lily stayed where she was, staring at the ground in front of her, feeling as if her heart was breaking all over again.
They were talking around her, arguing. A woman she hadn’t noticed stepped forward. She took Kane’s arm and pulled him to face her, putting her hands to his face and making him look at her. She murmured something to him that Lily couldn’t hear and Kane sighed, closing his eyes and putting his forehead to hers in such an intimate gesture that she was compelled to look away.
‘Fuck,’ Kane muttered. ‘Cut him loose.’
Mal sawed through the ropes around Quin’s wrists and he stood, staring at Lily. He didn’t say a word.
Bastian stepped forward. ‘I believe we’ve met you, Brother,’ he said to Kane, ‘but your unit, I have not.’
Kane acquiesced to Bastian’s friendliness with a grunt. ‘This is Lana, Viktor, and that is Sorin.’
Bastian nodded to them all, turning away with an almost comical grimace as his gaze fell on Lana. Lily had the presence of mind to wonder why, but as Quin and Kane regarded each other and then turned to stare unblinkingly at her, thoughts of anything save Quin and Kane left her.
‘How did you escape?’ Kane asked her. ‘I thought you were a prisoner in the Library. No one gets out of that place unless they go to the king’s dungeons.’
‘There is a unit of Brothers there,’ Lily said, her voice subdued. ‘They helped me escape.’
