Farin frowns. “I already told you. I did that for you. So you wouldn’t have to.”
Pain constricts my chest, and I grab onto Farin’s dressing and pull it tighter, partially to apply more pressure to the wound, partially because I know it’ll hurt.
He winces, but there’s amusement in his grimace. “Told you that you’re jealous.”
“There’s nothing to be jealous about,” I say.
“That, you’re right about.”
I bite my lip, my heart hammering, my mind whirring with how he must mean anything but what my heart so foolishly wishes he would mean.
But then Farin speaks, and his voice is so soft, so genuine, it’s like he’s a flame, and I’m the moth who knows better than to look, but simply can’t help myself.
“I don’t want Blaise.”
The hairs on my arms stand on end, and I hate the way I flush at his words. Loathe how I’ve been hoping for those very words to escape his mouth. The loathing is what keeps the question lodged in my throat, keeps me from asking him why.
Instead, I consider his question from earlier. Why I can’t seem to kill him, even to save myself. Why I dragged him out of the cave. Why I seared his wound to stop the bleeding.
“I guess,” I say, choosing my words wisely, “I want to believe that monsters are worth saving. I guess I want to believe that the past is like the fae curse, that it doesn’t make it through the Fabric. I want to believe that every time we start over in a new realm, we’re washed clean of whatever happened before.”
“And do you believe that?”
“It doesn’t really matter what I believe,” I say. Because as I look down at Farin, I realize that one way or another, if I don’t get him off this island, he’s going to die.
I’m not sure which way death will come, but on an island infested with giant scorpions and spiders, an island whose center is an active volcano, death will come for him one way or another.
And though I’m not confident that if I died in this world, I’d wake up in my true body, I can say for certain that Farin wouldn’t.
He doesn’t have a body to go back to.
“What was it like?” I ask.
He crinkles his brow. “What was what like?”
“Death?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Lonely.”
That single word stirs something within me. Something I shouldn’t have let fester, but now that I have, it feels too unwieldy for me to wrangle.
“What was it like?” he asks.
I offer him a soft smile. “What was what like?”
“Life?”
I open my mouth to answer, but the word gets caught in my throat.
That evening, as the volcano rumbles in the distance, looming our deaths over us, an idea comes to me.
When I tell Farin that it will involve returning to the canyon, within which lies the spot of the closed eyelet, I ask if he’s willing to come along.
He just offers me a cocky grin and says, “Where you go, I go.”
CHAPTER 101
BLAISE
We realize too late that it’s a trap.
Too easy. It was much too easy.
Sneaking through the palace, disarming the guards.
None of them saw us coming. No one put up a fight.
I reach the woman first, sinking my teeth into her wrist until a gentle numbness wafts over her, silencing her screams.
But it’s too late.
There’s no silencing the echo that cascades down the hall.
There’s a moment when we all look at each other and realize we don’t know what to do.
Not that it matters, because it was always going to end like this, anyway.
I know, because of the padding of paws, the slight scraping of talons against the marble floors outside.
