Page 97 of The Curse of Ophelia

He shook his head again, hair brushing his shoulders, eyes not leaving mine.

I ran shaking hands through my hair, forcing myself to keep speaking, to make him understand my anger so maybe I could keep it from turning into a toxic leech between us. “I spent them searching, desperately hoping to find a way to restore our lives. Clinging to the piece of my soul that insisted you weren’t dead, only to find out that you knew what you were facing when you left me, and you hid it from me. When you did that, you broke something in me.” I wanted to tear the room apart, throw something only to watch it break as irreparably as his decisions had shattered what had mattered most to me.

“Did this mean nothing?” I shoved my left arm forward, brandishing the Bind and the fresh set of white scars wrapped around my forearm. “To me, this meant that we were partners—that we faced life together. Yet you knew these secrets and chose to face them without me. You may as well have burned this from my body.”

He recoiled at the scars both on my body and within it. The exact pain he wished to avoid by leaving me. If possible, the shadows in his face darkened. The avoidance of his eyes tightened my chest with the realization of an even worse truth.

“Did you know when we received the Bind?”

His whole body tensed. “I didn’t know. Not everything—”

“You said this was so that we could always come back to each other!” I screamed, voice cracking, fingers locking around the Bind until my nails dug into my flesh. “It was all lies.”

“I didn’t know everything, Ophelia!” Now he was shouting, too—a wild tangle of desperation, anger, and hurt seeping from every part of him. “I was figuring it out, if you will let me explain myself.”

I had no interest in excuses, but I remained silent.

“I hadn’t trusted my father since the war began. The last time I had seen him—after the Curse first appeared—his lack of concern…It made me want to push him from the top of the mountains myself, the Spirit-forsaken bastard.” He ran a hand through his matted curls, fingers getting caught on the way back.

The shock of everything I hadn’t known about these pivotal moments of my life froze me.

Malakai cleared his throat. “Before the treaty was signed, he returned to Palerman for one night to see me. To threaten me, actually. At that point, I had my suspicions about his loyalties, but even I hadn’t imagined the full extent of his history. Or his plans.” He sighed, his eyes falling closed. “I had seen the bloodshed, Ophelia. Had seen the orphaned children and families in mourning. Me signing the treaty—agreeing to hand myself over—it would stop all of that. You can’t expect me to have not agreed. What is my life when it could save so many others?”

To me, it was everything.

But he was right. If I had had the power to save so many, I would have sacrificed myself. This was bigger than my pain, bigger than us. This was about the unfair deaths of thousands of warriors in an avoidable war. Shame at my own selfishness swept over me, but it did not wash away the taint of his betrayals.

“You should have told me from the moment you first suspected your father.”

“A part of me wanted to deny it all. He was my father—” His voice broke over the word. “Part of me didn’t want it to be true.”

Lucidius had made it clear to us both that Malakai was unwanted, nothing but a foil to his deceitful plans. Malakai, who had grown up honoring that man and hoping to one day follow in his footsteps. It was a miracle by the Angels that he still stood before me, showing even an ounce of fight against this twisted fate.

But the tattoo on my arm stung.

“You haven’t answered my question.” My grip on my arm tightened.

He took a shuddering breath. “When we received the Bind, I had already signed the treaty.”

The little air that had found its way into my lungs was squeezed out again. So that we may always come back to each other. All meaningless letters strung together in words of false sentiment.

“When I told my father I wanted the tattoo, I thought he’d kill me on the spot. He forced my hand into the treaty that night. I was so afraid of him, I barely knew the extent of what I was signing, only that I was handing myself over in exchange for the end of the war. But I did know that if I didn’t sign, the war and Curse would have continued to destroy Mystiques. And if I spoke a word of it, they’d have killed you as well.” Sadness crept into his obstinacy. “I thought this was the only way.”

The only way for thousands more lives to be saved. The only way for me to live.

His shoulders drooped under the weight of everything that he had suffered. Every heart-shattering truth that unveiled itself. That was the true gift of Kakias’s wrath. It was not enough for him to be handed over to the Engrossians at the hands of his father and face years of physical and mental torture designed to ruin him. A selfish part of the queen had wanted to hurt the child Lucidius had with another, and Lucidius had been weak and twisted enough not to fight her on that decision. Maybe once Kakias had broken Malakai, she’d have finally killed him, but first she had to crush his spirit. And mine in turn.

They took this most precious thing between us and destroyed it. We couldn’t rebuild it from the fragments—not with the lies that lay among the rubble. We could possibly forge something new from the heat of our pain, but it would never be the same. The glass had shattered around our innocence, our eyes opened, and healing those emotional scars would be complicated.

Maybe some things were meant to stay young and beautiful.

I swallowed that truth that I wasn’t ready to accept.

His father—his own father—was responsible for the broken man before me. I looked again at the scars that littered his once flawless body, forever reminders. Thoughts of war, Curses, death, and despair shadowed my mind—and one chance to stop it all. I recognized his bravery in those wounds. My anger didn’t subside, but my resolve finally cracked.

“Augustus,” I whispered, the name breaking the shield I had put up between us.

The utterance of that name from my lips was all he needed to stride across the room, arms sweeping around me. I didn’t try to wipe away the tears that flowed over my bloodstained cheeks. I let them cut a path through the dirt, sting the cuts, until they mixed with Malakai’s, dropping one by one onto his chest.

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