Page 116 of A Vow of Embers

He stood up. “Were you planning on inflicting some emotional ones?”

“No, but if you get drunk, would I get drunk? Or if someone poisons you, would I also be poisoned?”

Io’s eyes widened. “That we can test!”

She ran out of the room, leaving me alone with Xander. I was unsure of how to talk to him, what to say. I felt a little shy.

I also wondered what this morning would have been like if his sister hadn’t interrupted us. If we had slowly woken up to one another.

It felt like things had changed last night between us, but he seemed a bit distant and cold right now. Was that only because Io had been here? Or maybe he was as disturbed as I was by the revelation that we were now connected physically this way, our fates bound unless we could figure out a way to undo it.

I smiled to myself as I thought this would definitely put a damper on my plans to someday slit his throat.

He didn’t say anything to me and instead grabbed a tunic and went into the washroom.

I felt deflated and disappointed. He hadn’t so much as looked at me. I started to feel worried that I had misread last night. That maybe things hadn’t changed between us like I thought they had.

Did he think it was a mistake? Was he regretting it?

Io came in carrying several different vials. “Let me see your arm,” she said. I held it out while she looked at the bandage. “Is my brother hiding?”

“What do you mean?”

“I should have been more careful with him last night,” she said as she unwound the cloth in order to replace it with a new one. “You don’t know how much he is going to beat himself up over what happened to you. I shouldn’t have yelled at him, because he’s going to blame himself enough for the both of us that you were alone and attacked. Self-loathing comes too easily to him.”

Was that why he seemed distant? Because he was blaming himself?

“You can’t do your experiment,” Io said. “With the water.”

“I have to. I have to know if that’s the reason why we’re strong.”

“If it is, then it’s probably the only reason you survived last night,” she said, putting the new bandage on. “You are going to need it.”

“Xander’s going to stay with me. I’ll be fine.”

Her hands paused midair and she smiled at me. “You called him Xander. You’ve never called him that before.”

A fact her brother had also pointed out. “It’s his name,” I said, fighting back my embarrassment.

“Only to the people who love him.”

I didn’t love him but I had begun to think of him differently. When had that happened? I realized that it was when he had come for me, ready to save me.

That dream ... he was supposed to be my destiny. My future. As my adelphia kept telling me, somehow he was a big part of what I was meant to do.

He emerged from the washroom. Io told me to go use it myself. I tried to catch his eye before I entered but he didn’t look at me. Instead he talked in a low tone with his sister while she undid his bandage.

The washroom had obviously been cleaned while we were sleeping—there weren’t any bloodstains on the tiled floor. I hesitated at the threshold as my heart beat a bit faster at the prospect of entering this room again after what I’d gone through last night. I took in a deep breath while reminding myself that Xander was in the next room and that I was safe. I closed the door behind me and then used the toilet before washing my face and hands. I looked at myself in the mirror, and thought again of my dream, wondering what it had been trying to tell me. The voice I’d heard wasn’t familiar. I used to dream of the goddess so often and it had been a very long time since I had felt or heard her. I wondered if it was the same for the rest of my adelphia.

Especially Suri, who I knew used to dream of the goddess all the time and would sometimes pass along messages to me.

When I came back out, Xander was seated while Io watched an hourglass. “Do you feel anything?” she asked me.

“No. What should I be feeling?”

“A few minutes ago I gave my brother a special type of hemlock. It’s a poison,” she added, in case I didn’t know.

“You poisoned him?”