Page 156 of Silvercloak

“So it was you,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’re undercover.”

Saffron neither confirmed nor denied it, but her silence was damning enough.

He rubbed his weary face. “And so history repeats.”

Why did Levan keep falling for the women sent to ruin him? Was it because they were the only ones to show him any humanity—for the sake of getting close to him, for the sake of uncovering his secrets?

Saff swallowed hard. “If youportariout of here now, you’ll escape the—”

“That’s not what it is to be a Bloodmoon,” he replied quietly. “Family is everything. Loyalty is everything. My father is in there right now, battling it out with two of yours. Your captain’s been hit. She’s alive, but barely.”

Saints,Saff thought, with a savage clench of her stomach.

Levan twisted his lips as though in pain. “And yet here I am, crouched in a closet talking to you.” A disbelieving grimace. “I’m a senseless fool.”

“All the times you’ve tortured people for information when you could’ve just compelled them—why?”

A muscle feathered in his jaw. “I couldn’t risk anyone knowing what I am. It would’ve been immediately reported to my father, andmy father would’ve realized who’s been puppeteering him this whole time. Though he figured that out anyway, in the end.”

Saff’s chest rose and fell unevenly. “So why control your father at all?”

He gave a dark shrug. “Control or be controlled.”

“A bleak worldview.”

He gazed at her in turmoil, and she couldn’t parse the emotions, because there were somany.Shame, self-loathing, a kind of deep internal horror he’d never be able to outrun. A love so complicated neither of them could understand the exact shape of it.

“Do you want to know why I’m so powerful?” he said, voice clotted. “Why I can heal and wield and transmute and compel with such terrible force?”

Saffron nodded, dread curling in her stomach like a slow python.

He leaned his head back against the wall, letting his eyes fall closed, as though they were not in the middle of a brutal battle. “Not long after my mother died, my powers started to develop in earnest. It was clear I had a proficiency for healing, and so my father thought perhaps I could learn the subclass of necromancy and bring back my mother. He kept her preserved, just in case, using every scrap of ascenite they’d gathered over the preceding few years. But no matter how much I studied and practiced, I could never master it.” Inhale, exhale, both tremulous. “So one day, Vogolan came to my room and restrained me. Then he hit me withsen doloran. The torture curse. Hours and hours and hours he did it, trying to make my magic powerful enough to raise the dead. Pain is power, after all.” A flat grimace. “I was seven.”

Saffron’s stomach twisted. “But it didn’t work.”

A head shake. “He came back the next day, and the next day, and the next, believing that perhaps he could make my magicpermanentlypotent. It went on for years, and while he succeeded in twisting my magic into something monstrous, something unstoppable, I never did learn to raise the dead.”

“That’s horrific.”

He shrugged woodenly. “It’s hardly a new concept. Pain is the whole foundation of the Nyrøthi military, after all. They sleep on beds of nails, apparently, and high-ranking officers flagellate themselvesevery day at dawn. The Daejini have bits of themselves removed, so that the phantom pain might always hurt.” He held up his golden hand scornfully. “Even the Eqoran soldiers burn themselves with jeweled lighters when they need a boost.”

“Yes,” Saffron conceded softly, “but they aren’t children, Levan.”

His jaw clenched, and she remembered too late how much he loathed pity.

“You could’ve stopped him,” she added, both a question and a statement. “If you were that powerful, you could have prevented Vogolan from ever laying his hands on you.”

Another stiff shrug. “A large part of mewantedit to work.I would’ve suffered all the pain in the world to bring my mother back.”

“But why did Vogolan care so much about whether or not your mother was resurrected?”

Levan avoided her furious gaze. “I think I’ve always suspected, on some level, that my father gave the order. Like the brand, he just didn’t have the stomach to do it himself.”

“Suspected? You could just compel him into telling you the truth.”

A nameless emotion passed over his face. “I don’t truly want to know. Would you be able to go on, knowing your father had wished that upon you? If I found out for sure that it was him … I don’t know what I’d do.”

There was the deafening sound of wood shattering in the main shack. Saffron dug her nails into the rotting wooden floor. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”