The shattered conversations at the dinner table. A glass thrown, Valen’s father standing up as his chair fell backward. And not just a single word, but a phrase this time that broke him: you could have stopped her.
It was Valen’s fault his sister was gone. Valen’s fault that he was a weak, pathetic protector who couldn’t do his damned job.
What were older brothers for, after all, if not to protect their younger siblings?
Kalee would still be alive if not for his cowardice—singing in the halls, chasing him through hidden water coves and underground tunnels. Sitting beside him in the dance hall as Androma Racella, Kalee’s best friend from school, performed on stage in front of them.
As he drifted to sleep, he was haunted by one reality.
His sister was dead, and he was alive.
And somewhere out there, her killer ran free.
Thoughts like these were the worst of all.
*
Valen sat in his room, staring at a portrait of his sister’s protector turned killer.
A full moon ago, he’d been hard at work on it when Kalee had breezed past his closed door, thinking herself silent on bare feet. But Valen had always been one to pick up on the smallest changes in sound. And even more so, the changes in color.
He loved the way the paint on his brushes dried when he didn’t wash them, deepening from a royal, cloudless sky blue to a nighttime, starless black. Sometimes he saw the way a star shone purple, then white again, as it winked at him from high in the sky. He loved getting his hands on samples of fabric, observing the changes in shade as he twisted them this way and that in his fingertips.
And he always noticed—despite Kalee’s thoughts on the matter—the shifting of shadows slinking beneath his closed door. A dark, formless shape that was there one moment and gone the next.
It was how he’d come to be so good at following Kalee and her Spectre.
How he’d come to notice the grace with which Androma Racella walked. And her hair—a soft shade of pale blond to others that was much more to him. In sunlight, it shifted to a white so bright, it reminded him of freshly fallen snow. In darkness, it took on a silver sheen the color of the moon.
In the portrait before him, he’d painted her in two halves.
One bright white beneath the shining sun, almost blue at the points where it hung in shadow. The other half of her, he’d painted a muted gray, Androma’s hair like liquid moonlight spilling across her shoulders, the perfect accent to her stormy eyes.
He’d thought it a masterpiece. One of the best he’d ever done. And on that night, he’d been on his way out of his room, pride and a bottle of his father’s best Griss warming his chest, when he saw them leaving to take the transport for a joyride.
*
Valen closed his eyes and breathed deep.
His chest ached, as if it were about to split down the middle.
Tonight no shadows slipped by outside his doorway. No footsteps scampered along the cool marble floor, no hushed whispers or muted giggles bounded off the crisp white walls as the two girls rushed by, heading for Kalee’s room.
He should have stopped them.
He should have grabbed Kalee’s wrist and begged her not to go. Fallen to his knees like a child, or simply scooped her up and hauled her away while she screamed obscenities in his ear.
The memories pulled him under again.
*
“Valen.”
His mother’s voice, soft and broken, behind his closed door.
“She... She’d want you there. You’re her brother, Valen.” A deep sigh, followed by the unmistakable sound of her sniffing back tears.
He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t cry.
If he cried, the chasm in his chest would open wide, and he’d fall, and he’d keep falling until he reached the end.
His mother had always been strong. But tonight, she was like fractured glass. If he pressed too hard, she’d break. And then who would be there to pick up the pieces? Certainly not his father. General Cortas was busy giving press conferences and formal statements, and beneath his facade of cool, diplomatic calm was a belly full of liquor, downed from the cabinet in the back of his closet.
The chasm in Valen’s chest began to open, the heat in his eyes threatening to turn into flames. He blinked once. Twice. He could hear the moment his mother gave up and left, and the room seemed to take on a sudden chill in her absence.
So Valen sat and stared down at the portrait again, forcing himself to look, to see.
He’d done an excellent job, so real in his brushstrokes that it almost seemed as if Androma Racella was staring up at him now.
He didn’t want to do it.
Gods, he didn’t want to at all.
But tonight, Valen lifted his brush and uncapped a fresh set of colors ripe for creation.
His paintbrush, clutched in his hand, nearly snapped in two. But with each stroke, he let the sorrow slip away and something harder and stronger took its place. When he was done, he realized he’d been wrong before.
The old painting was child’s play. Now he’d finally created a masterpiece.
He hung it up to dry and left the room, casting only one glance back over his shoulder.
Androma Racella stared at him from the wall.
Half of her, the moonlit side, he’d left untouched. But the other he’d taken his time with, her face coated in splatters of crimson, in shades of purple so dark they looked nearly black against her pale, smooth skin.
Wet red paint trickled down her cheeks and slipped from the canvas onto the floor. A soft drip, drip, drip that reminded him not of tears, but of his sister’s blood.
A masterpiece indeed, as if Andi had ripped off the mask she’d been wearing and revealed to the world her second self, the one she’d been hiding just beneath the surface for so long.
With effort, Valen tore his eyes from the painting and closed the door.
The hallway was empty, the sprawling estate whisper silent. Everyone had already gone, adorned in shades of muted Arcardian gray, to attend Kalee’s funeral.
Androma Racella would not be in attendance. Instead, she was bound in chains, awaiting a trial she would not win. Thrown behind bars, stuck in some deep, impenetrable darkness that no color could thrive in—and no one, no matter how strong, could survive.
Until the injection finally stole her away.
Valen took equal amounts of pain and comfort in this as he walked.
They could throw Androma into the Pits of Tenebris for as long as they liked—even give her the death sentence—but it wouldn’t bring Kalee back.
When he passed by his sister’s room, he caught the slightest hint of her summertime scent.
It lingered like a distant breeze, quickly swept away when reality took its place.
The chasm in him broken, Valen Cortas fell to his knees in Kalee’s doorway and wept.
Chapter Twenty-Four
* * *
ANDROMA
ANDI WOKE TO pain lurching through her skull.
She was lying on her back, staring up into the darkness. Or she could have been staring down, for all she could tell. There was no end to it—no glimmer of moonlight shimmering on the walls, no smudged outline of her feet sprawled out in front of her as she slowly sat upright.