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He was always my enemy. When he turned his horse around in Lukub to heal me after Soraya put her knife in my chest. When he cradled my tearstained face and told me to run. When he kis— Enough.
How unbearably pathetic that the person whose advice I trusted most, whose counsel I wanted so badly in that moment, was the same one preparing to kill me. A tear slid from the corner of my unblinking eye. I let it roll to my chin before catching it with my thumb. Raising my hand to blot out the moon, I studied the droplet. The first and final tear I planned to shed for Arin of Nizahl.
It was also the moment Sefa saw the relationship between Sylvia and the Nizahl Heir was more dangerous than anyone recognized. Arin had been shouting—him, shouting—and the look on his face. Oh, that look. Sefa had never seen anything equivalent to it in her twenty-three years. It had sent foreboding shooting straight through her.
Sylvia had the power to make the most careful man in the kingdoms reckless.
For as expertly as Layla navigated the twisted games of royalty, Arin had the sense she had never crossed the line into experiencing the true savagery leashed at its core. Hers was a high-collared life of perfume politics and deals struck over lavish meals in gilded manors. If I were a sensible woman, I would slit your throat while you slept. Arin thrust the memory aside with an impatient hand. He did not need to scour his own mind to understand that a certain kind of violence appealed to him—that the Jasad Heir’s oceans of wrath had called to Arin like a poisoned fountain to a parched man.
His first instinct when he saw her wasn’t to reach for his blade or summon the guards. It was to shout run.
“What kind of dream? What did you see?” Namsa set aside her glass, watching me intently. I saw him. The words clogged up in my chest, restrained by a caution I didn’t entirely understand. It had just been a dream—what harm was there in sharing a dream?
“I love that girl.” Jeru paused his pacing to raise his brows. Marek rolled his eyes. “Like a sister,” he snapped. “Good,” Jeru muttered. Marek couldn’t be sure, but he could have sworn he heard the guardsman grumble, “We don’t need to give him another reason to kill you.”
“Have I gone mad?” Arin asked. She smiled. “The world will fall to ruins long before your mind does.”
If Arin was stone, then she was a river. Always moving, always flowing, no matter how fast the tide or how frequently she broke against its shores.
I covered my mouth to hide the wild laugh threatening to burst free. That cunning, brilliant man knew the best weapon against Al Anqa’a wasn’t a knife—it was his touch.
He showed you maps of their palaces, trained you in the ways of their courts. Before the Alcalah, you were already a formidable force, but now?” Namsa’s laugh floated, disembodied, over the dark mountains. “Arin of Nizahl created his own worst enemy.”
I wished I could look away, but in a room of beautiful things, Arin of Nizahl outshined them all.
Arin would find the body of Qayida Hanim and kill her again. He would hunt down each of her bones and crush them between his bare hands.
“Can it be?” Waid chuckled weakly. “Is that a glisten I see in the Silver Serpent’s eyes? Now, now. That was only the story of a single finger. How might you weep if we had recovered the rest of Hanim’s bones?”
“There you are.” His chuckle brushed my forehead, sending heat racing over my skin.
“Why should I bother tracking you when I need only to wait?” He pressed the words against my temple. “The moment you leave the mountains, you’re mine.”
“He will have heard about Mahair. He will come for you.” The veins pulsed. “Yes.” “If he captures you, we are lost.” I smiled. “He won’t.” Let Arin bring his strongest men. His best maps. Let him come, and I would show him what it meant to hunt Essam’s favorite monster.
Life does not allow you opportunities to travel down every path, to see the outcome of every choice. You can spend your entire existence frozen in one spot, squinting into the future, or you can decide to move. Pick a path and never look back.”
I threw the body to the ground as Raya called my name, but as I slashed and shouted warnings, I was Essiya and I was Sylvia. I was both and none, the perfect Heir and the brutal orphan, the living and the dead. I was two imperfect wholes melding into one.
Arin scanned the flames leaping over the wall, the mudslide, the soldiers hemmed into the front entrance. Piecing together my strategy. When his gaze met mine again, it glinted with pride.
But Arin couldn’t seem to focus beyond the way the man had put his hand on her arm.
Arin could watch her fight until weeds grew around his boots, and he had the sense he would never tire.
Arin grabbed her wrist, holding firm as she tried to jerk free, and dragged her back against his chest. He twisted her arm so her own knife balanced at the underside of her throat. “Found you,” Arin murmured in her ear. She tipped her chin up to glare at him, ignoring the blade at her throat.
Arin dug his fingers in the dirt and reminded himself what would happen if he twisted out from under her and pinned her to the earth. If he kissed the infuriating smirk off her face and let her tear into him a different way, unravel him in pleasure instead of pain.
All of me is written in your name, he wanted to say.
They do not get to take her from me.
“Oh.” “He could have killed you.”
“I wish I had a good reason for saving you. I wish it was logical or rational, informed by any semblance of reason. I wish more than anything my first thought when I emerged from the water was not of you, that I hadn’t been prepared to tear through every grain of sand and burn every tree in this damned place until I found you.”
“There is no if you survive. There is no future where it is my hand that ends your life.” This close, I could make out the austere lines of anguish twining around his rage. “If your magic takes you, I will drag you back. It cannot have you.”
He was the single most beautiful thing I had ever laid hands upon, and I was not good at treating the beautiful things in my life gently.
He’d laughed more in the last day than I had heard him laugh the entire time we’d known each other.
I knew my days of running were coming to a close. I could go anywhere I wanted, but my destination would always be him. He had made himself the threshold to a world where it might finally be safe to land. To stay.
What they had done in the Mirayah was not premeditated, measured, or thoroughly considered, and it had been the best night of Arin’s life.
When the dust settled, I would always be the one left standing. Survival was not the story of my success. It was my eternal punishment.
I’ve told you before, my liege—life is not an equation you can calculate over and over again. Every choice won’t be perfect, but you still have to make it.
“Yes,” Arin said. “I choose her.”
His last task would only take three days, if the winds favored. Three days until he reached the mountains. Three days until he reached her.
He was here. He was here, he was here, he was here.
The mighty Nizahl Heir, caught at last.
Efra grabbed my wrist and wrenched me away. “What do you think you’re doing?” I didn’t get a chance to respond. At the sound of my pained hiss, Arin—who had remained perfectly still and serene until then—moved. Before I could pull my wrist out of Efra’s grip, Arin kicked out the back of Efra’s knee and slammed his bound hands into the side of the other man’s head. It took seconds. Efra crumpled to the ground, and I darted in front of Arin, throwing my arms in front of him as Lateef and Namsa pushed toward the Heir.
Thumbs gentle on Arin’s cheekbones, I eased the tight blindfold off inch by inch. It slipped right over his hair, dropping to the ground behind him. Silver lashes lifted. Pale blue eyes ringed in shadow met mine. “Hello again,” I said. His gaze roved over me, assessing, then drifted idly over the top of my head.
The cold seeped into him from the floor. He barely felt it. As long as he didn’t look at her, he didn’t feel much at all.
If they killed him, I would bury this mountain in the sea.
“He didn’t fight back,” I whispered.
“You should not spend your tears on me.” “They are yours anyway, you idiot,” I sobbed.
“Why did you come here? I was ready to die. I was ready to be honorable and brave and self-sacrificing for the first time in my miserable life. I had made my peace. I would restore Jasad, burst into flames, and enter history as a savior instead of a coward. Simple.” “You are not going to die.” “Of course I am! I was always going to die—my time has been borrowed ever since the Blood Summit. I’ve been trying to be brave about it. To be like you. But then you come here, and you make me want to be selfish. You make me want to be a coward.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “You make me think I have a
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At that moment, without matches and without moving, Arin set fire to every map he had ever created. He watched the world he’d built—the world he’d believed—burn to ashes, and a new one rise to take its place. One that began with a girl sleeping at his side and ended with her alive. It was the only world he cared to participate in. The only world he would die to secure.
It was a bittersweet decadence, this choice. In the end, Arin picked her cheek. His bare thumb skated over the ridge of her cheekbone, and fire engulfed him.
Amusement warmed the eyes fastened to my face. “Do you never tire of trying to spill my blood, Suraira?” I quirked a brow. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
