Gods, I wish he’d just let me die.
I deserve it. I’m the reason Liam is dead. I’m so weak-minded that I didn’t even realize Dain took my memories and used them against me—against Liam.
“You have to fight, Vi,” Xaden whispers against my forehead as we move. “You can hate me all you want when you wake up. You can scream, hit, throw your fucking daggers at me for all I care, but you have to live. You can’t make me fall for you and then die. None of this is worth it without you.” He sounds so sincere that I almost believe him.
Which is exactly what got me into this situation in the first place.
“Xaden?” a familiar voice calls out, but I can’t place it. Bodhi, maybe? One of the second years? So many strangers. And no friends.
Liam is dead.
“You have to save her.”
You’re all cowards.
—The last words of Fen Riorson (redacted)
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
XADEN
“She’ll be all right.” Sgaeyl’s voice is gentler than she’s ever deigned to use with me. Then again, she didn’t choose me because I needed coddling. She chose me for the scars on my back and the simple fact that I am the grandson of her second rider—the one who didn’t make it through the quadrant.
“You don’t know that she’ll be all right. No one does.” It’s been three fucking days, and Violet hasn’t woken up. Three never-ending days I’ve spent in this armchair, walking a knife’s edge between sanity and madness, studying every rise and fall of her chest just to be sure she’s still breathing.
My lungs only fill when hers do, and the time between my heartbeats is filled with sharp, all-consuming fear.
She’s never looked fragile to me, but she does now, lying in the middle of my bed, her lips pale and chapped, the ends of her hair duller than their usual bladelike hue. For three days, everything about her has felt as though the life was leached from her body, only a shadow of her soul left beneath her skin.
But today, at least, the morning light shows her cheeks have a little more color along the darker line of her flight goggles than yesterday.
I’m a fucking fool. I should have left her at Basgiath. Or sent her with Aetos, even if it strained Sgaeyl and Tairn. She never should have suffered the punishment Colonel Aetos delivered. For a crime she didn’t even know I was committing. Didn’t even suspect.
I run a hand through my hair. She wasn’t the only one who suffered.
Liam would be alive.
Liam. Guilt pairs with soul-sucking grief, and I can barely inhale around the pain in my chest. I’d ordered my foster brother to keep her safe, and that order got him killed. His death is on me.
I should have known what was waiting for us at Athebyne—
“You should have told her about the venin. I waited for you to impart the information, and now she’s suffering,” Tairn growls. The dragon is the living, fire-breathing embodiment of my shame. But at least the bond that links the four of us is still in place, even if he can’t communicate with her—which means Violet’s alive.
He can yell at me all he wants as long as her heart’s beating.
“I should have done a lot of things differently.” What I shouldn’t have done was fought my feelings for her. I should have grabbed on to her after that first kiss the way I wanted and kept her at my side, should have let her all the way in.
My eyelids scratch like sandpaper each time I blink, but I’m fighting sleep with every bone in my body. Sleep is where I hear her heartbreaking scream, hear her cry that Liam died, hear her call me a fucking traitor over and over.
She can’t die, and not just because there’s a chance I won’t survive. She can’t die because I know I can’t live without her even if I do. Somewhere between the shock of our attraction at the top of that turret to realizing she risked her own life by giving up a boot for someone else on the parapet that first day to her throwing those daggers at my head under the oak tree, I wavered. I should have realized the danger of getting too close the first time I put her on her back and showed her how easily she could kill me on the mat—a vulnerability I’ve allowed no one else—but I brushed it off as an undeniable attraction to a uniquely beautiful woman. When I watched her conquer the Gauntlet, then defend Andarna at Threshing, I stumbled, stunned by both her cunning and her sense of honor. When I burst into her room and found Oren’s treacherous hand at her throat, the rage that made it so easy to kill all six of them without batting an eye should have told me I was headed for a cliff. And when she smiled at me after mastering her shield in mere minutes, her face lighting up as the snow fell around us, I fucking fell.
We hadn’t even kissed, and I fell.
Or maybe it was when she threw her knives at Barlowe or when jealousy ate me alive seeing Aetos kiss the mouth I’d dreamed about countless times. Looking back, there were a thousand tiny moments that pulled me over the edge for the woman asleep in the bed I always pictured her in.
And I never told her. Not until she was delirious with poison. Why? Because I was scared to give her power over me when she already held it all? Because she’s Lilith Sorrengail’s daughter? Because she kept giving Aetos second and third chances?
No. Because I couldn’t give her those words without being totally, completely honest with her, and after the way she looked at me at the lake, the utter betrayal—
The rustle of sheets makes my gaze whip to her face, and I take my first full breath since she fell from Tairn’s back. Her eyes are open.
“You’re awake.” My voice sounds like it’s been dragged across gravel when I thought it’d only been my heart.
I stagger to my feet and take the two steps that separate me from her bedside. She’s awake. She’s alive. She’s…smiling? That must be a trick of the light. This woman likely wants to set me on fire.
“Can I check your side?” The mattress depresses slightly as I sit near her hip.
She nods and stretches her arms up like a cat who’s been napping in the sun before reaching for the blankets.
Drawing back the covers, I untie the robe covering the short nightdress I changed her into that first evening and slowly lift the hem above the silken skin of her hip, preparing myself for the black tendrils that discolored her veins during the flight but receded slowly since we arrived. There’s nothing. Just a thin silver line an inch above her hipbone. Air gushes from my lungs in relief. “Miraculous.”
“What’s miraculous?” she croaks, looking down at her new scar.
Shit. I would be a horrible healer. “Water.” My hand shakes with exhaustion, or relief, I don’t even care which, as I pour a glass from the pitcher on my bedside table. “You must be parched.”
