Page 52 of A Flame of the Phoenix (An Heir Comes to Rise #6)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Zaiana

Z aiana startled at the awareness of a nearby presence. She winced, retracting her arm, which was caught awkwardly between the bars with her chains.

When her heavy lids peeled open, her eyes widened, and she pushed up to her knees.

“Ky,” she breathed.

A stiff tremble that had nothing to do with the cold shook over her body.

He was examining his hands, face drawn in confusion as he huddled in the corner, and towering behind him…

Wings like none she’d ever seen before.

Zaiana stared unblinking. They were the most beautiful things she’d ever laid eyes on. Dark with feathers, giving a moon-spilled gleam. How could it be possible?

“What happened to me?” he mumbled, so terrified and detached it cleaved her.

“You’re going to be okay.” The words ached up her dry, tight throat. She didn’t have the right to tell him that.

“I’m a monster,” he said in disgust.

Zaiana winced. She’d never heard him use the term so truly. He teased her with it, but this was something he believed about himself with the wings he had now.

“You’re not,” she tried to say, but she didn’t know how to make it convincing. Didn’t know what sequence of words could possibly get him to believe nothing had to change.

Kyleer reached behind himself, but he stopped shy of touching his wings, as if it repulsed him to acknowledge they were real.

“What do you call this?” he snapped.

“I have them too.”

He finally looked at her, and the fear she knew she would confront stole the air from her all the same.

No recognition. He didn’t know who she was.

“Where?”

“They’re glamoured. Hidden.”

“Why?”

“Because they could take them from me, and that would be as good as death for me.”

He contemplated her words. “Did they do this to you too?”

“No,” she whispered. “I was born this way.”

“Then why do they imprison you?”

Zaiana didn’t know what to do. How to begin to explain everything. He had to remember.

Maverick remembered.

Though finding out what it took for him to remember filled her with hopeless despair.

She neglected his question. “I’m sorry they did this to you.”

He weighed her sympathy, and she watched his guard rise against it. It was the wrong thing to say.

She wasn’t the person he needed right now, but Gods , that hurt. Not caring was easier to live with. Zaiana wanted to be the right person for him, but she was already failing.

“I don’t remember anything,” he said.

“You were Transitioned to dark fae. Not many survive it, but you did. You have people counting on you. Those who love you.”

She couldn’t bear the distance in his moss-green irises. Then, realizing the color of them…

“Your eyes aren’t black,” she said, more to herself as she puzzled over his unique Transition. All the fae who had become dark fae by the same ritual had lost the color of their eyes. Maverick’s had been a brilliant cobalt blue the first day she’d seen him.

Kyleer frowned. “Should they be?”

Zaiana looked around her cell. Finding a rock, she swiped it up. “Come here,” she said, holding out a hand.

He hesitated before obliging, glancing between her and the rock warily.

“This will just be a sting,” she warned before cutting his skin.

Kyleer hissed, yanking his hand back and staring at her incredulously. Zaiana was too distracted by the crimson that beaded from the shallow cut, sliding over his tanned skin.

Not black blood either.

She didn’t know what it meant. What he was, if not dark fae. Then why had his memories been stolen? That reminder brought back her despair, but she wouldn’t stop trying to help him gain them back.

Zaiana said, “It’s not going to be easy, figuring this new life out, but you’re alive.”

“I don’t know if I want to be,” he confessed.

“I do.” It slipped from her mouth before she could stop it. “I want you to be.”

Zaiana was riddled with nerves and vulnerability. All her life spent shunning such emotions was now her ultimate downfall as she became as fragile as glass.

“Did I…care for you?” he asked.

“Maybe. I think you might have been starting to.”

“What happened?”

“I betrayed you. I hurt you.”

His eyes flexed at that. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I am a monster. Not you. No matter what, that is not you.”

Every word she spoke he calculated as if deciding what to harbor as truth, but he hardly showed emotion.

“My name…?”

“Kyleer.”

“Yours?”

“Zaiana.”

Kyleer shuffled after a moment of observation. She thought he was about to turn from her, but he came closer, until they sat face-to-face with only bars to separate them. His green eyes and his heartbeat… In all the tragedy, Zaiana found peace that those precious parts of him remained.

“Zaiana,” he repeated, as if he were feeling that single word, and she braced for it to be met with rejection. Instead he watched her thoughtfully. “Why are you sad?”

The sob that escaped her came so suddenly she couldn’t hold it back. As if he’d released the bubble she didn’t know she was choking on.

“It hurts,” she whispered.

“You’re wounded?”

“Yes.”

Zaiana collected wounds like armor. So many of them hidden inside her she was a map of scars, torn and broken, and she didn’t know how to fix it. Fix herself.

“Is there…anything I can do?” he asked carefully.

She sniffed away her pitiful spilling emotions. “Try to remember,” she said. That was all she wanted.

His brow twitched at that. “You said you betrayed me—then why do you want to help me?”

Zaiana had nothing left to lose. Kyleer would live, and she didn’t plan to be around much longer to face all that was threatening to kill her before she could have her revenge.

“I regret it,” she confessed. “I don’t regret much in my life, but I regret hurting you.”

“Then why did you?”

“I thought I had to, and I guess I thought you would be better off for it. Without me.”

“Was I?”

“I don’t know.”

Kyleer took a long breath, shifting to lean against the wall, but he struggled with his wings to find a comfortable position.

“It’s best if you splay them a little. Just relax them,” she offered.

Kyleer tried to do as she suggested. It slipped his feathered wing through the bars of her cell, and she fought the urge to reach out and find out if they felt as soft as they looked. The puzzle of them not being membranous like every dark fae she’d ever seen still swam in her mind.

“So what are they going to do with me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “She’s not going to get a chance to do anything else to you.”

“Are we allies then?”

Zaiana shook her head, and her gut twisted with his flinch of disappointment. “I’m only going to make sure you get out of here and back to them. Then I’ll go my own way.”

“Who is ‘them’?”

“Your brothers,” she said. “One just looks far more like you.”

Zaiana’s nose stung to pass back the same words he’d used to describe them to her once in his room.

“Brothers,” he repeated, staring distantly as if he were trying to find their faces. He shook his head in frustration when they didn’t surface. “How am I supposed to remember?”

“I’m going to help you,” she said, shuffling closer. “I don’t know if it will work, but if you want to try, I’ll tell you everything I know. It might not be enough, because there were so many things I wanted to learn about you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“What for?”

“Wanting to know.” He paused, his face turning thoughtful. “I don’t think many would.”

She didn’t answer. A long stretch of silence fell between them.

“You’re freezing,” he said.

Zaiana thought she was doing a good job of stifling her trembling. She glimpsed the snowfall out the high box window.

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“Come here.”

Her sight snapped to him with the bold request.

“What’s the point in any of it if we both freeze to death?” he added at her hesitation.

Zaiana shuffled over to the wall, moving tentatively, as if one wrong move would retract the wing she leaned into carefully. It curved around her, and the radiating warmth of his body edged her in closer.

She didn’t deserve this comfort, but it might be the only thing she had to remind herself she couldn’t die yet. She had to plan their way out of here.

Her fingers rose as if in their own trance, and she inhaled delightfully at the first contact with the black feathers. When they shuddered, she snatched her hand back, cheeks heating at the impulsive touch.

“So, how are we going to break out of here?” he mumbled, as if it were only a fantasy and they could conjure the wildest escape since none of it would come to pass.

“I have a feeling it’ll take spilling a lot of blood,” she said.

Kyleer swallowed at the mention. Then it dawned on her.

Blood.

Did he need human blood to survive like a Blackfair?

No—that wasn’t the name he would carry.

It sounded so wrong.

“Your name is Kyleer Galentithe,” Zaiana blurted with an urge. “Don’t forget that.”

“You already told me.”

Zaiana shuffled closer, tucking up against the bars. She extended her senses, head throbbing with the extra effort considering her bindings. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them. But I have a second chance while they think I’m powerless here in Niltain Steel.”

“You’ve said you’re sorry twice now.”

She had no energy to form the defense she usually would. He could expose every vulnerable part of her, every weakness, and she was too broken right now to fight it.

“I know. It can’t fix anything.”

“I only mean…why do you care so much?”

Zaiana didn’t want to deny anymore. “I think I gave you my heart,” she whispered, clutching the bars and leaning her forehead to the cool metal. She couldn’t look at him with the confession—it was taunting her to take it back. “Before it had a beat, it was yours. Even now, it’s cold and not worth much. Should you not have woken up…you would have taken it with you, and I don’t know what I would have become in my vengeance. Should she have killed you for good, I might have caved in the world just to take her down with me.”

For the first time in her life, she felt at peace giving him possession of what was left of her while she still could. She didn’t have the courage to look up, nor the strength to pull away when he reached closer.

“Then I promise to protect it with everything I am. Beyond this life, I’ll use it to find you again. That’s what it’s worth.”

A tear gathered, falling before she could stop it, but it felt freeing . Ironically liberating to be this breakable in front of him and not care about hiding it.

Zaiana nodded though it scraped the metal over her skin. “Maybe in another life, things would be different. A few days ago…you died in front of my eyes, and all I could think of was that you were gone and you would never know that I might have hurt you, but in doing so, I’d have hurt myself more. You’re not done breaking me, Ky, but I don’t fear it anymore since you’ve never let the pieces shatter. Despite the sharp edges, you still held them.”

His warmth slipped over her cheek, shivering her body stiffly at the treasured contrast to the bitter-cold air wrapping the cells.

“In truth, I don’t think I know myself anymore either,” she said in defeat.

“I want to remember,” he said.

All Zaiana knew was to how be strong, and that meant building wall after wall against anything that threatened to feel . To feel was weakness. Emotions clouded judgment and exhausted the body. She faced it now with crushing punishment as all her walls tumbled down and she became buried under their weight.

Kyleer said, “Maybe we can find ourselves with each other.”

Zaiana enjoyed the notion. To be found with him…or within him.