Page 134 of A Promise of Peridot
“I think he’s in the gardens, Lady Arwen,” Barney supplied.
“Thank you.”
I raced for the castle garden as fast as a bird in flight.
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kane
Maybe she’d like the pansies. I reached for their long stems but retracted my hand. Too boring. The spider orchids were more joyful, more unique. Like her.
I plucked a handful and added them to the growing bouquet. Spindly bat flower, cerulean daisies, and pitch-black lilies, of course—her namesake and the flower that populated my dreams most nights.
I trudged back through the castle doors and up the winding staircase to my room.
I had given Eardley Beth’s father’s description. Griffin would walk him through where Halden and his men had last been stationed in Peridot, and we’d hope the man was still being kept there, alive.
Dagan would get ravens to our spies, as he had when the blade first went missing. If the blade was in Onyx, someone had to have quite the network to have kept it a secret for the last five years. Dagan would start with Briar and go from there. Beth had said it was“thrown beneath heaps of other weapons. Tied to another master,but yearning to be paired with its mate.”He’d search every weapons cache, every hoarder, every high-ranking criminal boss in every city. Again. We’d do it all again.
And I would track down the White Crow.
Arwen was leaving with Fedrik. I wasn’t bitter. I wasn’t angry. Or, if I was, it wasn’t the emotion I was leading with.
I wanted her to be protected, to live, and to enjoy doing so. I’d never free my mind from the sound of her sobs last night. Thousands of years I’d live if I failed to take her place. And that memory would stay with me through each and every one.
I had to dosomething.
And have hope something could be done.
Stepping into my bedroom in Shadowhold after all these weeks away felt like bathing after a hot day spent in mud. I sighed, deep and even, and walked toward my desk to twine Arwen’s flowers, but my eyes lingered on my bed.
A memory, so potent it was as if I had stepped backward in time, shot through my mind at the sight. One of Arwen, in that very bed, two days after her battle with the wolfbeast. She was wearing my shirt, eating breakfast, laughing as she bit into an apple.
“Kane,” Arwen said, breathless.
Oh Gods.I had finally lost it. I was hallucinating now.
“Kane?” she said again, this time a murmur of worry twined with the urgency.
I whirled.
There she was. Hand clutched to her sternum, breathing rushed, lit by a pool of fading sunlight in the foyer of my room.
“Are you all right?”
She stepped inside, olive eyes wild. “You weren’t in the gardens.”
“I was—”
“I have to... I have to tell you something.”
I quirked a brow. “Go on.”
“I’m in love with you.”
My heart stilled.
“Also, I think Drake Alcott stole the Blade of the Sun and took it with him to Hemlock Isle, and it’s still there now, five years later. Are those for me?” She pointed at the flowers in my hand.
