Page 62 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

MISCHE

R aihn was furious. I could smell his rage like wildfire smoke. He approached me, one step after the other.

“What,” he breathed. “The hell. Have you been doing ? You turn up at our doorstep, half dead, in the arms of a prince of a kingdom we’re practically at war with?—”

My heart clenched. “At war?”

“No,” Raihn snapped. “I get to ask questions now. Where the hell have you been? Do you have any idea the things that we have been doing to find you? You couldn’t send us a letter? A few fucking sentences saying, Hello, Raihn. How’s the weather? I’m alive! ”

I wasn’t alive.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Gods, I felt terrible .

The bleak reality of our situation slowly rolled over me. Angry goddesses and vengeful warriors. A broken underworld. Wraiths. Divine war.

The litany of horrors that followed Asar and me wherever we went.

And we were here. Here, in the home of some of the most precious people I knew.

We couldn’t be here.

My eyes darted around the room—empty aside from the three of us.

“Asar,” I blurted out. “Where’s Asar?”

“Asar?” Raihn repeated. “You mean the fucking Wraith Warden, Mish?”

I winced. “He’s?—”

“Oh, I know who he is, and I can’t believe that we’ve just let him within our castle walls.”

“The only thing he has going for him,” Oraya said quietly, “is that he saved your life. He’s locked up.”

“You locked him up ?” I yelped.

“This is us being nice, Mische,” Raihn said. “Because we wanted to talk to you, alone. Without a Shadowborn prince here manipulating your mind.”

I choked a laugh. “Manipulating? No. No, that’s not?—”

“Don’t laugh at me,” he spat, “like it’s some kind of ridiculous proposition.”

“I remember the last time I found you in this castle with a Shadowborn prince,” Oraya said. “Won’t ever forget it.”

I glanced at Oraya, and then had to force myself to look away. Because the look on her face reminded me far too much of the night she had rescued me from a bedchamber just like this one, where I had been imprisoned as a gift for the man who had Turned me.

I’d always been able to feel Oraya’s emotions so strongly. Right now, her hurt cut deep. I had once worked so hard to earn that trust, and now, I felt every crack as I destroyed it.

My chest hurt—gods, my chest hurt. My heart thumped against the inside of my ribs in an odd, distracting way, and I frowned as I looked down at my hands.

They looked different. Felt different, too. Burn scars peeked out from beneath my sleeve.

Scars.

What the hell?

“I need to see him,” I said.

I threw back the covers, already halfway to standing up, but Raihn raised his hands. “Wait. You’re not going anywhere.”

I gave him as cheerful a smile as I could muster. “I can walk.”

“I don’t care if you can fucking walk. You need to tell us what happened to you.” He flung a hand to the window, revealing the eternally dark sky. “You disappear and then the world is fucking ending and now you show up with some Shadowborn?—”

“He shouldn’t have taken me here,” I said.

“I’m glad he did. At least now you can’t just force me to turn around.”

The compulsion. My face heated with shame. I could barely bring myself to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. But even that tasted like a lie.

Because I wasn’t sorry. I would do it again.

Even now, I found myself testing the edge of his mind, considering whether I could make it work.

I could ensnare Raihn or Oraya, but probably not both, and in their own home, it wouldn’t get me far, anyway.

Raihn would never forgive me. I knew it. I didn’t blame him one bit.

“I don’t care,” he spat. “I don’t care, Mische. Mess with my head. Twist my thoughts. Fine. If that’s what you need to do to feel safe, do it.”

“Feel safe?” I bit out. “That’s not what I?—”

“That’s not what pisses me off. What pisses me off is that you felt like you had to do that. I’ve known you for nearly a century, Mische. Nearly a hundred goddess-damned years. Haven’t I earned your trust?”

The words cut. But it was the look on his face—genuine, vulnerable, beneath the rough edge of his frustration—that pierced my heart.

Oraya sat at the edge of the bed. She reached for my hand, and instinctually, I jerked it away. Hurt flickered over her face. I stared down at her open palm against the bedspread.

When I first met her, Oraya had been so afraid of the world that she wouldn’t even let anyone get within five feet of her. The first time she’d let me hug her, I felt like I’d won the Kejari.

And now I was the one to push her away.

“We can’t help you until you tell us what’s happening to you,” she said, her voice hard and soft at the same time in that particular way of hers. Tenderness beneath steel.

I looked at her and saw her as Vincent did. I thought of the House of Night collapsing beneath the weight of what I brought to their doorstep.

I said, “I need to see Asar.”

Their disappointment crushed me.

A muscle feathered in Raihn’s jaw.

“You will stay here until you recover,” he said. “I’ll bring Asar to you. But you stay here.”

I started to protest, but Raihn cut me off.

“How many fucking times now have you made decisions about my life without my input, Mische? Entering the Kejari. Forcing me to—” His jaw tightened, and he swallowed the words.

“I’m making this one for you. Just one. Three days.

And then if you want to walk out of here, fine.

Go. But I’m not going to let you die in my kingdom.

I’ll give you anything you ask for. But I refuse to give you that. ”

Tears stung my eyes. The weight of the secrets that I was keeping from them threatened to smother me. I could barely keep them down.

They went to the door and Raihn threw it open.

“Wait,” I blurted out.

They stopped, turned. They actually looked hopeful.

All of it sat at the tip of my tongue.

But the best I could choke out was, “I really, really missed you.”

Raihn’s face softened. But he still looked so brutally, heartbreakingly sad. “Us too,” he said, and closed the door behind them.