“No, I’m not fucking okay with it,” Demetrius snapped. “But I don’t have a damn choice here. It’s either this or death. And I can’t—I won’t—lose her. You have to do this. She’ll be in the red suite, on the fifth floor at nine o’clock. I’ll make sure she’s there.”
“Tonight?” Nick stepped back. “Holy fuck. Isn’t that like rushing things just a little?”
“You want her to suffer? Because that’s all you’re doing by making her wait.”
“What if everyone in that room is wrong?”
“They’re not. You and I both know deep inside this is about the soul mate curse. I can feel it. I know you can too. She grows weaker every hour. There’s no telling how long she has left. If the stress on her body gets to be too great, it could push her into cardiac arrest. Callia’s given me every gruesome detail, and I can’t… I don’t…” He drew in a shaky breath. “Meet her tonight and finish this, Niko.”
There was a time, not all that long ago, when Nick would have relished those words from his estranged brother, but not now. This wasn’t any kind of victory. And he knew if he agreed to this, none of them were going to walk away unscathed.
Nick closed his eyes. He’d gladly trade time in Zagreus’s torture chambers for this fucked-up mess. “I don’t want this. I don’t…want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t let her die. Do the right thing.”
Holy hell. Nick didn’t know what the right thing was anymore. He didn’t want anyone to die, not his people, not Casey and Callia, and especially not Isadora. But this… What they were all asking him to do…
Pressure built in his chest, made him feel like he was being sucked under a rolling, brutal wave. He needed Cynna. Needed to see her and touch her. Needed her to center him, like she’d always been able to do. Needed her to tell him what the hell he was supposed to do next.
“I’ll…” Fuck. He couldn’t believe he was actually about to say it. “I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long,” Demetrius said as Nick turned for the stairs. “Our soul mate doesn’t have much time.”
Cynna stared out at the darkening view from the window seat in the room she’d shared with Nick last night. A wide beach stretched beyond the castle walls and disappeared in rolling waves that lapped at the shore. But her gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the clouds had parted just enough to let a few shrinking rays of sunlight pass through as the sun set low in the distance, drawing everything into darkness.
She closed her eyes and breathed deep. She’d been silly to think she could have any of that sunshine in her life. The dark was all she knew. Since her parents had died, it was the only thing that was consistent.
The door behind her opened and closed, but she didn’t turn to look. Couldn’t. Not with the tumultuous way she was feeling at the moment.
“I thought maybe you’d left,” Nick said in a quiet voice.
Cynna blinked back the useless sting of tears and told herself all wasn’t lost…yet. He could very well be here to announce that he’d told the queen and everyone else in that room to fuck off. “The last time I did that, I didn’t make it very far.”
The sound of his footsteps drifted across the carpeted floor, then he sank next to her on the window seat, where she sat with her back to the wall and her knees pulled up to her chest. But he didn’t touch her. And a little voice in the back of her head whispered that was not exactly a good sign.
He leaned forward and rested his forearms against his thighs. “How much of that craziness did you hear?”
Skata. He hadn’t told them to fuck off. If he had, his shoulders wouldn’t be bunched and that guilty look wouldn’t be pulling at the corners of his eyes.
What little hope she’d been clinging too dropped like a stone into the pit of her stomach, and that voice mocked, What the hell did you expect? She’s his soul mate. “Enough.”
He looked down at the floor and clasped his hands together. “It’s nuts, right? I mean…really…outrageous.”
No, it wasn’t just outrageous. It was completely sick and twisted, but it wasn’t Cynna’s place to say so. She had no hold on him. She wasn’t his soul mate. And she’d known that from the moment she’d gotten emotionally involved with him. She’d just stupidly let herself fantasize that it didn’t matter.
“So I take it she really is going to die.”
He still didn’t lift his head. Just continued to stare down at the floor with that blank, unreadable expression. “It looks that way.”
Steeling herself against a conversation she didn’t want to have, she dropped her feet to the floor, careful not to touch him, then pushed to standing. “Well, it looks like you’re getting everything you ever wanted then. Even with your brother’s blessing.”