Page 44 of A Promise of Peridot
“Move throughthe last year of your life?”
I bit my tongue against the nagging hurt in my heart. It wasn’t too different from what Kane had accused me of, and Mari, too.
“Much better than watching you walk through life like a corpse.”
“It’s not enough to just survive, Arwen. You have to actuallylive.”
“Fine,” I said, my eyes landing back on Dagan. “I’ll go.”
But his expression wasn’t one of satisfaction. “And what about Kane?”
I sighed. “What about him?”
“Do the same rules apply?”
Ire simmered in my veins. “Aren’t we done here? I agreed to go.”
But Dagan persisted. “You wish to deny what you feel for each other, lest you open up your heart only to be wounded again?”
“Are you taking his side? After all he kept from me?”
“I didn’t tell you of your fate or your lineage, either, Arwen.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t fall in love with you.”
Dagan stood there quietly, letting my words sink in.
A mild breeze carrying the freshness of the pines tossed my hair around my face. A single seagull, stark against the clear blue sky, pulled my gaze overhead. It rose over the shining castle spires and toward the sea.
I had never spoken the words out loud.
Not even to Mari.
But those feelings hadn’t died with Kane’s betrayal. With all of Lazarus’s men that I butchered. With my mother. The scars of what I had felt for Kane were as pronounced as the ones Powell left across my back.
“You did that on purpose,” I finally said, bitter.
“If you really aredoomedas you keep saying”—Dagan’s lips curved with the faintest hint of a smile—“I have very little time to teach you quite a lot about life. I’m simply trying to speed up the process.”
“Now who’s making the dark jokes?”
Dagan loosed a sly laugh and sat back down on the grass. After a beat, I joined him.
15
kane
Everything was killing me. My head, my heart, my eye sockets.
It was worse than those excruciating days on the ship sailing for Citrine when Arwen could barely look at me, and I had wanted to throw myself overboard for lying to her. I had known I was bad for her then.
Now I knew I was terrible.
“You broke my heart.”
Each time I pictured her saying the words, I drowned in a fresh onslaught of misery. And I had almostfucked her—her first time, too—in some nondescript Azurine alleyway. Fucking deplorable.
I hated myself for all of it. I’d never stop.
