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Dawsyn stands, towering over him, but her lips do not cease in their trembling. “I do not even recognise you,” she spits, the words quiet and filled with anger. Worse, they are – as they always are with Dawsyn – horribly, cuttingly true.

CHAPTEREIGHTEEN

She says nothing more, has no air with which to say it.

How can he be here? How is it that he lives? How can he stand before her, here on this mountain, whole and well?

And heiswhole. The midnight eyes, the keen stare, the dark stubbled jaw. The place where his eyebrows bunch as he frowns, the way the skin along his throat pebbles when he looks at her. All of him is here… alive.

All of him is shockingly, inexplicably well.

All of him betrayed her.

Her mind collapses and rebuilds, over and over. Unimaginable relief, followed and overthrown by crippling fury.

He watches her carefully. No wings nor talons. Just Ryon. The hybrid. A man she once thought of as hers. Does he feel the pull that she does? Do his hands and heart and stomach ache? Does it feel like an illness to him? An infection? Does he feel the urge to cut it out as she does?

There is a tear in the sleeve of his shirt, a smatter of blood droplets stains it. Even this… this small wound feels intolerable to her. She cannot kill him. Can’t so much as cut him.

And she despises herself for it – that she cannot cut him away, however much he might deserve it.

“Ask me,” Ryon says, jaw ticking. “Ask me if it is true.”

Dawsyn stills. Dread befalls her. She shakes her head. She cannot speak.

Ryon advances. “Ask me if what the Queen said was true, Dawsyn. Ask me if I made a deal to kill you.”

But Dawsyn cannot hear the answer. She cannot hear his excuses and spend her life wondering if they are lies. Even more so, she doesn’t want to hear that it was true – that everything Alvira told her was real.

“I saw it,” she breathes. “I saw your face, hybrid.”

He does not respond.

“The Queen offered you a deal. She asked you to kill me.”

“Yes,” Ryon says, now without hesitation. “She did. Now ask me if I took it.” He watches her with a pleading stare, willing her to listen, to see.

Dawsyn turns her face away. She allows herself another moment to crumble, where he cannot see it this time. Then she swallows the pain, swallows the relief. “Whether you took it or not is only half of your betrayal,” she spits. “You kept it from me. I need not know more.”

Dawsyn begins to stride away. She means to leave him there in the snow, lost and alone as she was before they met, before she left one prison for another. The wind carries his voice so that she cannot hear what he says, but she is unable to block it completely.

“Mal – Dawsyn, wait!”

She won’t. She wants to erase his dark stare from her memory.

“Fuck… Dawsyn, stop. Listen! Someone comes!”

She stops abruptly and turns. “What?”

Ryon halts below her, his hand raised. “Listen,” he implores, gesticulating to the cascading slopes behind them.

She narrows her eyes, searching, hearing the faint sounds of footfalls in the distance. “Who?” she asks, voice turning to steel.

“Guards, I presume,” Ryon answers. “The very ones I escaped.”

Dawsyn pierces him with a glare. “Are you so incompetent?” she asks acidly. “You led them here?”

He grits his teeth, swallowing some smart retort. Wise of him. “So it seems.”