The Assassin's Blade (Throne of Glass, #0.1-0.5)

by Sarah J. Maas

And suddenly, as the memory of that day echoed through her, she remembered the words Sam kept screaming at Arobynn as the King of the Assassins beat her, the words that she somehow had forgotten in the fog of pain: I’ll kill you! Sam had said it like he meant it. He’d bellowed it. Again and again and again.

A servant had started a fire, and she was about to begin dressing for the Harvest Moon party when she spotted the pile of papers on her bed. They were tied with a red string, and her stomach fluttered as she pulled out the note placed on top. Try not to stain them with your tears when you play. It took a lot of bribes to get these. She might have rolled her eyes had she not seen what lay before her. Sheet music. For the performance she’d seen last night. For the notes she couldn’t get out of her mind, even a day later. She glanced again at the note. It wasn’t Arobynn’s elegant script, but Sam’s hurried scrawl.

“What more can I say?” he exploded, his whisper rough and harsh. “I’ve already told you everything—I’ve already told you that if I stay here, if I have to live with Arobynn, I’ll snap his damned neck.” “But why? Why can’t you let it go?” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Because I love you!” Her mouth fell open. “I love you,” he repeated, shaking her again. “I have for years. And he hurt you and made me watch because he’s always known how I felt, too. But if I asked you to pick, you’d choose Arobynn, and I. Can’t. Take. It.”

He looked like she had hit him. But she went on, and grasped both sides of his face, “Because I’d pick you.” And then she kissed him.

“The guards spotted me in the cellar and shot at me.” He grabbed at the breast of his suit. “One of them hit me right in the heart. I thought I was dead, but the arrow clattered right out. It didn’t even touch my skin.” He peeled open the gash in the front of his suit, and a glimmer of iridescence sparkled. “Spidersilk,” he murmured, his eyes wide. Celaena smiled grimly and pulled off the mask from her face.

He removed her hand from his cheek to kiss the tips of her fingers. “I get scared, too,” he murmured onto her skin. “You want to hear something ridiculous? Whenever I’m scared out of my wits, I tell myself: My name is Sam Cortland … and I will not be afraid. I’ve been doing it for years.”

She opened her eyes and found him watching her, his face a mixture of pride and wonder and such open affection that she could see that far-off land where they’d find a home, see that future that awaited them, and that glimmer of hope that promised happiness she’d never considered or dared yearn for. And even though the southern continent was a drastic change in their plans … Sam was right. A new continent for a new beginning. “I love you,” Sam said.

The body still smelled faintly like Sam. And like the cheap soap she’d made him use, because she was so selfish that she couldn’t let him have her lavender soap. Celaena buried her face in his cold, stiff shoulder.

She would tuck Sam into her heart, a bright light for her to take out whenever things were darkest. And then she would remember how it had felt to be loved, when the world had held nothing but possibility. No matter what they did to her, they could never take that away.

“My name is Celaena Sardothien,” she whispered, “and I will not be afraid.”