The Heart of Betrayal (The Remnant Chronicles, #2)

by Mary E. Pearson

Her tears, they ride the wind. She calls to me, And all I can do is whisper, You are strong, Stronger than your pain, Stronger than your grief, Stronger than them.

I came for you, Lia, no matter who or what you are, and I don’t care what mistakes I made or what mistakes you made. I’d make every single one again, if that was the only way to be with you.”

“I know what burns in you, Lia. They’ll pay for this. All of it. I promise. One day they’ll pay.”

“Lia, I know your feelings about me may have changed. I deceived you. I’m not the farmer I claimed to be, but I hope I can make you fall in love with me again, this time as a prince, one day at a time. We’ve had a terrible start—it doesn’t mean we can’t have a better ending.”

“There’s actually nothing precarious about my position,” I said. “I’m wanted for treason in my homeland, and here you’ve taken my freedom, my dreams, and my brother’s life. Everything I care about is gone, and you wear my dead brother’s baldrick as proof. What more could you take from me?”

How quaint. How very quaint. Like believing some things last forever. A tear. As if that could make a difference.

“Aster,” I repeated. The same name as the powerful angel of destruction. But she looked more like a forlorn angel with badly clipped wings.

I reminded myself of the look in her eyes when she first saw me before we crossed the bridge, her gaze that tore me sternum to soul, the one that said we were all that mattered, and I promised myself as I spit blood onto the floor, that one day I would see that look in her eyes again.

The wind, time, it circles, repeats, some swaths cutting deeper than others.

He took my hand and slowly kissed my knuckles one at a time, just as he’d done back in Terravin, but now I thought, This is Prince Jaxon Tyrus Rafferty kissing my hand, and I realized it mattered not one whit to me. He was still the person I had fallen in love with, crown prince or farmer. He was Rafe, and I was Lia, and everything else that we were to other people didn’t matter to us. I didn’t need to fall in love with him again. I had never fallen out.

The before and after of my life cleaved in two that day, in ways I could never have imagined.

“Malich laughed the night he told me that he had killed Greta. He reveled in her death. He said

it was easy. Her death cost him nothing. It will now. Every day that I breathe, I will make it cost him something. Every time I see that same smug grin on his face, I will make him pay for it.” She dumped her winnings on the bed and looked back at me. “So the short answer to your question, Kaden, is no. It’s not enough. It will never be enough.”

Now I understood why Sven preferred soldiering to love. It was easier to understand and far less likely to get you killed.

When you think you’re at the end of your rope, give it three more days. And then another three. Sometimes you’ll find the rope is longer than you thought.

I found no satisfaction in the fact that I had become as accomplished at deception as Kaden. All I tasted on my lips was my carefully calculated lie.

Once upon a time, there was a man as great as the gods.… But even the great can tremble with fear. Even the great can fall.

Only one thing felt certain in my heart. Three women were torn apart. Three women who were once family.

I’d give him his marriage, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t turn some fraction of this moment to my advantage, and fractions of moments after that, until they added up to something whole and fearsome, because with my last

dying breath, I would make him regret the day he ever laid eyes on me.

Fear and thannis were two things that seemed to grow easily in this kingdom.

“The rules of reason build towers that reach past the treetops. The rules of trust build towers that reach past the stars.”

“You were never a proper princess.” His hands cradled

my face, and his smile faded. “But you’re everything I want. Remember that. I love you, Lia. Not a title. And not because a piece of paper says I should. Because I do.”

“Let me make this perfectly clear to you. Though some might seek to make it appear otherwise, I am not a bride to be bartered away to another kingdom, nor a prize of war, nor a mouthpiece for your Komizar. I am not a chip in a card game to be mindlessly tossed into

the center of the pot, nor one to be kept in the tight fist of a greedy opponent. I am a player seated at the table alongside everyone else, and from this day forward, I will play my own hand as I see fit. Do you understand me? Because the consequences could be ugly if someone thought otherwise.”

I wished that love could be simple, that it was always given and returned in the same measure, equally and at the same time, that all the planets aligned in a perfect way to dispel all doubts, that it was easy to understand and never painful.