KIRAN

My heart falls through my chest.

Lies. That’s all this boy has ever told. Lies.

“Asha?” I breathe, willing it not to be true, to be another one of Az’s manipulations.

My wife swallows. “I’m so sorry, Kiran.”

An arrow of doubt pierces my chest, crushing my ribs, and it’s like my brain is trying to undo it, make sense of how the arrow doesn’t exist, and none of this is real, and my wife is not the one who betrayed me.

Az nods to Asha. “Go on,” he says.

“Yes, I think you’d better do that,” says Lydia. “Go on, Asha.”

Asha flinches at Lydia’s words, but she turns her attention back to me, licking her perfectly full lips.

“I know you didn’t mean to,” she says, taking a careful step toward me. “I don’t blame you for any of it. Know that, please.”

Fin grits his teeth. “What’s going on, Kiran?”

I shake my head, because I have no idea what she’s talking about. What my wife is talking about. I don’t even recognize her, don’t…

Asha looks at my hands, bound in goblin iron. Sadness sweeps over her features, and I can’t help but marvel at how different the emotion looks when it reaches the entirety of her face.

I don’t recognize her. I don’t recognize my wife.

Tears flow down her cheek now, wetting her flawless skin. “I didn’t believe him, at first. I thought he was delusional. I fought it for so long, but…” She swallows, her throat bobbing, like there’s a lump in it. “But then what he claimed started to come true. My feelings for you, Kiran. I wanted so badly for them to be real. Please know that.”

My chest is caving in. I can’t breathe.

“But he was right. The longer I was away from you, the more they faded. It was the case back in Othian, when you were stuck in Mystral. I ignored it then, thinking it was just my magic panicking, distracting me. And then you came back, and all was right again, because of course it was.”

I hate this. I hate the way Asha’s looking at the ceiling, grating her teeth like she’s reprimanding herself for being such a fool. “I don’t think you always realize when you’re doing it, when you’re leaking your feelings into others. It happens slowly, and it sticks around for a long time once it’s taken hold. But the longer I’ve been away from you, the more empty I’ve felt. And Kiran, I thought it was just that I missed you. That I’d been ripped from my life, that everything was crumbling to pieces around me. I thought I was depressed. But then I realized that wasn’t it. It was like…like something had drained out of me. Like I…” She swallows. “It was like when I first lost my eye, and there was a darkness there in my periphery that I wasn’t quite used to, encroaching on me even when I didn’t realize it. I’m sorry, but Az was right. The longer I’ve been away from you, the more my feelings have faded.”

“Asha.” Her name is a plea on my lips.

She swallows. “It’s like a part of the magic is lodged in my heart. I can’t quite get it to go away. Like it’s taken root. I need…I need you to take it away.”

My heart stops.

“What did you do to her?” I whisper, my words javelins I intend to pierce Azrael with.

Azrael just looks at me, and for the first time, I see no smugness in his gaze. Just desperation.

“Please, Kiran,” he says. “Just let her go. Let her be happy. That’s all we ask.”

“What. Did. You. Do.”

“He didn’t do anything,” cries Asha. “He didn’t do anything. I asked for this. I’m so, so tired, Kiran. I just want to be whole again.”

My heart fragments. “I always thought you already were.”

A sad smile paints Asha’s lips. “I know you did. I’ll never forget that, you know. Never forget what a friend to me you became.”

My world crumbles around me, and there’s no one in the room. No one but me and Asha.

I always thought my worst nightmare was Asha dying.

I’m realizing I was wrong. This, what I’ve done to her, is so, so much worse.

“Kiran, is it true?” asks Fin.

I turn to look at my brother, but I have no answer.“Please, Kiran,” Asha says.

I swallow the grief in my throat as I look up at my wife and nod, slowly.

“You’ll need to unbind me to make this happen,” I say, my voice flat as I turn to Azrael.

He stiffens, looking back and forth between me and Asha, uncertainty flickering in his eyes.

Lydia scoffs in Azrael’s direction. “Oh, we know you’re not that stupid. You knew you’d have to unbind him if you wanted his magic.”

The bile in my stomach sours at her words, because maybe Azrael doesn’t need me at all. Maybe he has another leeching stone and can simply drain my magic from me. But my dread is short-lived, because Azrael straightens. “Of course I did. But I need reassurances,” he says. “Reassurances that you won’t attack us. That you won’t hurt me. Not now. Not ever.”

Ice skitters through my veins.

“You have my word,” I say. Immediately, the fae curse snaps into place around my neck. “As long as you let my siblings go free of harm, and swear that never, until the day you die, will you lay an unwanted hand on Asha.”

Az stiffens. “I’ll need your word from both of you,” he says to Fin and Lydia. “And you won’t fight my guards as they escort you out of the palace.”

“As long as Elias remains safe, you have mine,” says Lydia.

Fin takes longer, surveying Asha with grief in his eyes. “Just don’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to, and you have mine too.”

Az smiles. “Then we’re all agreed.”

The fae bargains snap into place, and just barely, I think I see a flicker of worry in Asha’s beautiful, haunting eyes.

Several of the guards remove Lydia and Fin from the premises, carrying Elias’s limp body with them.

A nearby guard removes my shackles.

I smile at my wife, just faintly, and reach for her hand, readying to take any feelings away she might have for me, searching her face for any sense she might have changed her mind.

Please change your mind. Please let this be one of your tricks, I whisper to her with the yearning in my eyes.

Tears roll down Asha’s cheek.