I suck in a breath. Because right away, I know what he’s referring to.
There is one question that’s burned into the back of my mind. I’ve carried the taste of its ash on my tongue, felt the char of its presence seeping down my throat.
Everything between us becomes so heavy. So stretched. A perilous point where there is no soft side to fall on. The longer I stay silent, the more misery saturates Slade’s face. But the question continues to burn. Smoking up my head, raking flames down my spirit.
“Ask. Me.”
One tear. One tear leaks out of me, so hot that I wouldn’t be surprised if it steamed against my cheek.
But I ask.
Looking him in the eye, my own anguish now matching his, I ask the one question I haven’t wanted to. “Where were you?”
When I was drugged.
When I was shoved into that room with Digby.
When my ribbons were slashed, right along with my soul.
When I was propped up on that mezzanine, confused and lost.
“I thought you were going to come. But you didn’t.” My voice is choked, shaken, and every word I say lands a flinch across his face. “So where were you?”
CHAPTER 27
SLADE
Where were you?
It’s the way she says it. The smallest warble in her throat, so tiny that anyone else would miss it. But not me.
When it comes to Auren, I make it a point to notice everything.
So I hear it—the pain. And I know that by initiating her to ask this question, I’m leading her down the path of that night. A night I’m sure she doesn’t want to think about, much less talk about. But we need to.
She looks at me steadily, golden eyes shining almost as much as the blue veins running through the cave. “I thought you were going to come,” she tells me, and the confession bleeds like a wound from her tongue. “But you didn’t.”
I have been beaten. Stabbed. Head held beneath water until my lungs burned. I have been ripped apart by the fury of my power to the point where it felt like my skin was flayed from my body.
But none of that is as painful as hearing those words out of Auren’s mouth.
It’s a physical thing, this culpability. Guilt isn’t a strong enough word for what I feel, for what I carry.
As if it wasn’t enough that I fucking rotted her, I let her down. And somehow, that’s far worse.
All her damn life, people have let her down. Over and over again, she has put her faith in them, and they have failed her. And then the night when she needed me, that’s exactly what I did.
Failed her.
My mind flashes to that night. The night before it all went to shit. She left my tent, a secret smile curving her plush lips, and all I wanted to do was drag her back in and devour her all over again.
I wish I had.
If only I’d taken her hand and asked her to stay. If only I hadn’t let her go back into that castle.
When Hojat tended to her, and I saw the state of her back...
A tightness punches me right in the sternum. Her ribbons. Her charming, unprecedented, beautiful ribbons. Gone. Hacked away. Left in a frayed and bloody ruin.
I don’t think I’ll ever get that sight out of my mind.
It’s no wonder that she can’t bear for me to look.
“So where were you?” she asks me, and even though I wanted her to ask, I still flinch.
“I fucked up. In every possible way.”
Scenarios keep running through my head. If only I’d done one thing differently, maybe I could have stopped it.
“Lu told me that Queen Kaila had overheard you two when she walked you back from camp. She doubled back after the queen was gone, had to bypass countless guards. By the time she made it to your room, you were sleeping. She stayed waiting in the halls until dawn and then saw that you went down to gild for Midas. She waited to make sure it was all okay before she came back to camp and told me what happened. I ordered her to get some sleep first, because she was about to fall over. I knew she needed rest before she could search for Digby. So I sent Judd in her stead, but he turned up empty.”
Auren listens intently, and it’s as if I can see her mind merging her timeline with mine.
“I tried to warn Mist—the saddle who’s carrying Midas’s baby,” she tells me. “Tried to warn her about Queen Kaila, but she didn’t want to listen to me. And then I was going to try and sneak out and tell you what happened, but Midas came, wanting me to use my magic. So I made him a deal.”
I guess it immediately. “Digby.”
She nods. “I was a fool.”
“No, Midas was just a fucking monster.”
She glances down. “I used my magic all day. Thought he was going to actually let me have Digby back. I’d say that’s the definition of a fool.”
I hate the bitterness in her tone, because it’s directed at herself.
“Auren—”
“Keep going,” she tells me.
I swallow back my other words with a nod. If she wants me to keep going, then that’s what I’ll do. “The night you and I were supposed to meet at the library, I went through Ranhold’s gate to get inside. Lu was with me, ready to search for Digby.”
I force myself to dive straight in, without inflection, without pause. Because while I haven’t spoken it aloud, in my head, I’ve gone over the events leading up to finding Auren too many times to count.
“Ryatt was supposed to be waiting there for us, but he never showed up. We didn’t think too much of it, because him being late isn’t out of character. We went inside, but instead of us going our separate ways, we were headed off by Midas at the entry.”
“What did he want?”
My jaw jumps as I grind my teeth. “He pulled me into a fucking meeting. He was stalling me. I just didn’t know it at the time. What I also didn’t know was that there were problems with villagers coming too close to our army’s camp, so Judd and Osrik were dealing with that. Meanwhile, Lu wasn’t having any luck finding Digby, and then I found out Midas had detained Ryatt.”
Her brows jump up in surprise. “He arrested him?”
“I didn’t find out until later.”
Understanding dawns in her eyes. “Ryatt was detained because of me. Because Midas thought that he and I...”
“He told Ryatt that he’d wrongfully touched what didn’t belong to him,” I tell her, my jaw gone tight. “By the time we got out of this pointless meeting about our fake fucking alliance and trade deals, it was very late, and with the ball happening the next day, the castle was busy. There were servants and guards everywhere. It took some time, and we had to go up to my room first, but then Lu finally left to start her search for Digby, while I went up to the library. I knew you wouldn’t be there since it was much too late by then, but I looked for a note or any indication that you’d been there.”
I hear her swallow.
“I didn’t see any,” I say, and then I wait, on edge. Because I have pieced together what happened as best I could with the others, but now I’m finally going to hear it from her own lips.
“I never made it to the library,” she says quietly, and when she looks back up, her eyes are far away, all the way back in Ranhold.
“I tried to go up to your room, but there were too many guards. I didn’t want to tip off Midas. I already knew things were precarious with Queen Kaila,” I add.
“I wasn’t there anyway,” she tells me. “Or maybe I was back there by that point, I have no idea. If I’m piecing the timeline together correctly, Midas had already...” She chokes on emotion, has to clear her throat before she can get the rest out. “It had already happened. Maybe I was already stuffed back into my room by then, I don’t know. I was pretty muddled.”