Page 143

I dart my gaze up to him. “You kept it? All-all this time? Why?”

A sad smile blooms on his face. “Because I know how much it means to you. But I didn’t want you to have to worry about the risk of me keeping it for you.”

My voice cracks. “Cole—”

“Wait. One…last…thing. I promise,” he whispers. He takes my hand and flips my palm open, places his mother’s ring in the center, and closes my fingers around it.

His throat bobs as he twirls and tucks a stray hair behind my ear, dragging his finger underneath my jaw and locking my gaze with his own. “It doesn’t matter what you think of me or how you feel about me now. Because for me, it’s always been you. And italwayswill beyou.I am fearfully yours, my love. Wonderfully in love with every piece of you, broken and whole. Regardless of whether you love me or not. Something might have changed in you, but you never changed in me.”

My lips tremble at the delicacy of his words, my throat constricting. Tears blur my vision, and my heart swells and breaks all at once. Little does he know how much has changed in me. Part of me doesn’t deserve his words—not when I fell so easily into someone else’s bed and without giving him any chance to explain himself. Gods, the secrecy of what I’ve done alone is suffocating. I’m digging for the right words to say and for the right moment. The realization slams into me—this must’ve been what it felt like for him, keeping his betrothal to Celeste a secret.

“Cole, wait. There’s something you should know—”

An alarm bell slices through the somber night from the outpost. Both of us whirl toward the sound. A glow of a torchlight leaks from the outpost, growing brighter by the second.

Someone cries out in the distance, “Captain! Somebody get the captain!”

Cole drags his gaze back to me, brushing a tear off my cheek.

He nods, a soft smile lifting his face. “Go.”

thirty-nine

BLOOD OF POWER

But I don’t go—I can’t move. Cole disappears off into the outpost, and I watch him go with an overwhelming sense of longing crushing every breath from my lungs.

Gods damn it all. I can’t help it—I love him. Even if I try not to. Even though it destroys every piece of me and would be so much easier if I could turn it off.

As I’m about to turn back toward the forest to meet Daeja, I catch a flicker of movement outside the northern part of the outpost. A group of three men march toward the camp, one of which pulls a woman by rope fastened around her wrists. She stumbles and lands face first onto the ground. Rather than waiting for her to get to her feet, her captor drags her along the ground.

One of the other men halts her captor and nudges the woman’s side with a boot. “Get up!”

But she doesn’t. She says something muffled by the distance between us, and the men flinch. The man demanding her to get up unclips a whip on his belt and rips it down her back.

I flinch.

Even from this distance, her cry echoes within my ears. The wicked snap of the whip draws me back to the night two prisoners were hanged from the outlook tower—their pleas a hushed whisper until it swells to a roar inside my head. The snapping of their necks resurface each time the man lashes her. Every sinister crack breaks something in me. Piece by piece. Every one of her agonizing cries ripples inside my head.

The third man of the group snatches her hair and rips her off the ground, pulling her to her feet. The four of them disappear off into camp.

Perhaps it’s stupid—but I can’t think past the opportunity to save her. Not when I failed to act all those weeks ago when two other prisoners were executed, and I stood idly by.

Before I can think better of it, I head back into camp as I slip Cole’s mother’s ring onto my finger and tuck the map and journal back into my satchel.

“Daeja, I have to do something first.”

Everyone gathers in the middle of camp. Torchlight casts wicked shadows across the throng as I push through to get closer to the center. Everyone stills. The crowd falls silent as Darian pulls the battered woman, restrained by rope, into the center of the squad. The only sounds to cut through the silence are the flickering torches and heavy breathing from the woman. Sherakes her gaze around the group, her lips pulled back in a feral snarl.

Horror settles in me at the rivers of crimson blood trickling down her face. I can’t imagine what other wounds she has outside of the visible ones on her face. Considering I witnessed her whipping, the amount of pain lacing every inch of her skin must have been excruciating.

Darian scans the crowd. “We must send word to the King. We have captured a rebel!”

The squad erupts into triumphant cheers. We’ve never caught a live rebel before. They’ve either died in combat or killed themselves. No doubt to avoid the King’s torture to glean critical information.

“Give her to me,” Cole booms.

The squad falls silent again, all the attention turns toward Cole as he shoulders through the crowd.