Page 179 of Eternal Ruin

You’re only making this harder, his voice returned.You should have killed her.

June shook her head, fisting her hands.

When she lifted her chin, Taj’s autumn eyes found her. He blinked rapidly, warm colors swirling in his eyes. Was he disappointed she’d left without saying goodbye? Did he hate her now too? She looked away before she found out.

Susenyos lifted his shirt and turned, exposing his lower back. The three deep red claw marks marred his brown skin.

“This is why I left.” He exhaled.

Compulsion marks… No.

Taj untied his headband next, revealing the same horizontal marks. A ringing filled June’s ears.

Slow, thrumming with danger.

I have a hideous scar, he’d told her, but this went beyond that.

Taj was meant to exist in this world, in the golden sunlight of Uxlay, never in the folds of her nightmares. But he’d crossed that threshold, stared into somethingunspeakable, and was suffering greatly for it. June’s heart constricted, staring at the small smile on his face. His resignation to his fate.

There was no salve, no remedy to heal this. A tremble started in her knees.

Iniko muttered something and pulled at her flower-shaped collar, exposing the slender neck now ruined with marks.

It’s on all of them.

Her sister’s attention was fixed on the scars, confusion clear in her gaze. Kidan could never hide when she loved someone. It was in the creases of her brow, those harsh lines on her forehead, the drawing of her square shape. Even now, her body was poised, ready to launch herself before any threat. As if she knew, deep down, nothing in her life was safe.

A stone sank in June’s gut.

“I left you all because—”

“He left you all because—” Taj cut in, stepping forward and making Susenyos’s eyes widen.

The tremble traveled up June’s body, to the base of her spine.

Susenyos flashed before Taj, seizing his shirt. “You’re not doing this. This is my sacrifice.”

“Yos?” Kidan said, slight alarm in her tone. Susenyos stilled, not looking back at her. A struggle played on his face, before his eyes hardened.

Lusidio places those compulsion marks to hide his true identity.

They’d die if they spoke of it.

June wrote those words years ago, kneeling before a stone pillar. Her fingers streaked with ink, sometimes tears. All her life, she wrote and she listened.

But what good was her knowledge if she didn’t share it?

Taj gave his friends a final, heartbreaking look and faced the throne. For a second, his warm gaze found June. Something delicate went through them, a conversation between their souls. He was about to die. Without a goodbye, a single complaint. She hadn’t known Taj long, but she felt a strange sort of connection to him. Everyone else disappeared, smudges in her periphery as she glimpsed the longing in his gaze, a wish for another day or hour. Still, there was no anger, no resentment. He wanted to be where the knives fell, absorb all the impact and contain it to himself.

A piercing thought stole her breath.

This is how I will die too. Without telling the truth buried deep inside me.

And for the first time, anger vibrated in June’s bones. It washed over her in sudden, unrecognizable waves, stirring the urge to fight back. To steal back a day or hour. Whatever little time she had left, she wanted to fight.

Without giving herself time to think, June bolted forward, one step, two, three, until she was standing in the very center.

Every head in the vicinity, including Kidan’s, was turned toward June. Taj’s bewildered eyes fixed on her. Her back grew hot with Samson’s and Arin’s attention, but she forced herself to speak.