Page 76 of A War of Embers

“Do you know why you have a death wish?” Rowan asks.

“I don’t have a death wish,” I snap. I’m not reckless, at least not usually. “I just don’t understand why you’re doing this to me.”

Something akin to pain flashes across his face, so fast I wonder if I truly saw it. “Because you need to live.”

A cryptic answer that tells me nothing. “If you don’t want to help me, fine. I’ll keep searching until I find someone who does.”

“And what happens when you find that person? When he or she tells you that you’re wasting your time? That the consequences of your actions are the motives you’re seeking to escape from? What then? What if they require you to sacrifice someone anyway so there’s balance to your death?”

“That won’t happen.” People don't get sacrificed when someone chooses to die. Being immortal with nowhere for my souls to go means they simply blink out of existence.

“There is balance in this world. If you die, someone takes your place to live.”

He’s full of shit. Trying to rile me up to the point I give into his asinine point of view. He’s wrong though. The balance doesn’t affect my dying. No one has to replace me. Plenty of immortals have been stripped of their souls, their bodies fed to the creatures in the Blood Sea and their souls extinguished.

Not everything exists on a power scale where it must be level at all times. Reality doesn’t work that way. It angers me that Rowan would stoop so low as to try and use the idea of an innocent dying to get what I want.

“I’m preventing deaths.”

He immediately shakes his head. “You have no idea what you’re asking for. I’m saving you. This is the part where you tell me I’m welcome for choosing to put you on the right path instead of one leading to destruction.”

His version of destruction is a lot different than mine apparently. All I foresee is a few people missing me, some happy I’m gone, and Lady Gwenyth’s outrage over being bested by her own slave. The last part is what fills my dark heart with giddiness.

“You aren’t going to listen to me, are you?” Rowan sighs. “You’re bound and determined to do this the hard way.”

“The right way,” I correct instantly.

“Sure,” he scoffs. “If you consider being blind to the people who care about you, who love you.” When I go to open my mouth and tell him he’s absolutely wrong on all accounts, he silences me by saying, “Alyvia loves you. She will mourn you. Meredith and Deena are under the impression you are going to train them to become an elite force to rival the male guards. They will be pissed at you for dying and miss you as well.”

“They’ll move on,” I grit between my teeth. Every person I have had to watch die, people grieved. They were always important to someone, but it wasn’t the same type of importance that kept them there to begin with. People might miss me, might mourn me, but they don’t know me well enough for it to impact them the way Rowan is trying to describe.

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be hesitating. You would be causing way more trouble than you are.”

I lift a brow mockingly. “Would you like me to show you the kind of trouble I can cause by demanding people help me?”

“Sure. If you think you can do that kind of damage on innocent people who turn you down to ensure the next person doesn’t. You would be embodying the very type of person you are saying you don’t wish to be. So either you’re as cruel and unhinged as the Lady who created you or you’re the little monster, fierce and protective, trying to fix her injustices.”

I swear, I’m two heartbeats away from trying to drag out his own soul to show him I mean business. But the thought of causing him harm immediately sets off a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach. Torturing Rowan feels like pouring acid down my throat and trying to speak all at once.

I can’t hurt innocents.

It goes against everything I’m trying to accomplish. I want the injustices of what I’ve done in this world to end with me. No one else. And Rowan fucking knows that. He knows how badly I want to protect people from turning into me as much as I also want to finally rest in the Cliff of Embers. At some point I may hit my breaking point, but at this moment, I haven’t quite yet.

“You have suffered enough,” Rowan says gently. “Why do you keep punishing yourself for something out of your hands?”

“You’re not going to change my mind,” I stubbornly tell him.

“Maybe not. But you’re still here until I decide otherwise.” He bends down, brushing a soft kiss over my unmoving mouth. “You’ll forgive me one day.”

The stubborn asshole really believes that. Fine. If he’s completely against helping me, I’ll find another way. His private study already gave me more than enough information to go off of. Maybe next time he’ll think twice before trying to trap a woman with a death wish.

Alyvia stares at me for several long beats. Her mouth flops open before snapping closed at least eight times before she makes a noise of complaint in the back of her throat. Then her gaze drops, pointedly looking at the mark of Rowan’s teeth on my neck. Not even the thickest of makeup will cover the purple splotch marring my skin.

Snapping my fingers to gain her attention, I irritably ask, “Do you know anything about this?”

“N-No,” she sputters. “Only Lords and Ladies are granted access to the knowledge of how the Cliff of Embers work.” She blinks several times before seeming to gather herself. “Keres, you can’t just go there–”

“Why not? Other people have,” I point out. Supposedly other people have gone to the Cliff of Embers to rest their immortal bodies and souls, even if it’s an unconfirmed account. I still believe what the document said. Maybe immortals weren’t killed in battle during the Province Wars but sent into a deep rest instead.

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