The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,30

the terrace.

I looked at him, his shoulders slumped. Spent. But the weariness I saw in his eyes came from someplace else, from words that had carved out pieces of his flesh, one calculated day after another. My words. I scrambled for a defense, but there was no more anger in his expression, and that left me hollow. It gave me nothing to push back against. I had no game pieces left to play.

“I’m sorry, Kaden.”

His lip lifted in a pained expression, and he shook his head, as if to ward off any more apologies from me. “I’ve had time to think about it,” he said. “There’s no reason I should have expected the truth from you. Not when I was the one to lie and betray you first back in Terravin.”

It was true. He had lied and betrayed me, but somehow my lie seemed like the greater crime. I had played with his need to be loved. I had listened sympathetically to his deepest, most painful secrets that he had never shared with anyone. He let me into a raw corner of his soul, and I used that to gain his trust.

I sighed, too weary to parse out guilt like chits in a card game. Did it matter if my pile was bigger or his? “That was a lifetime ago, Kaden. We were both different people then. We both used lies and truth for our own purposes.”

“What about now?”

I saw him holding it out to me tentatively, truth, a treaty written on the air between us. Was truth even possible? I wasn’t sure what it was anymore, or if now was the time for it.

“What is it you want, Kaden? I’m not sure why you’re even here.”

His blond hair whipped in the wind. He squinted into the distance, but no words were forthcoming. I saw the struggle, his search for the false calm he always painted on his face. It was beyond his grasp now.

“You’re the one who just proposed truth,” I reminded him.

An anguished smile pulled at his mouth. “All those years … I didn’t want to see the Komizar for what he was. He saved me from a monster, and I became just as driven as he was. I was ready to make an entire kingdom pay for the sins of my father—a man I haven’t seen in over a decade. I’ve spent half of my life waiting for the day he would die. I blocked out the kindnesses of every person in Morrighan that I ever met, saying it didn’t matter. It was the cost of war. My war. Nothing else mattered.”

“If you hated him so much, Kaden, why didn’t you just kill your father? Long ago. You’re an assassin. For you it would have been an easy enough matter.”

He cleared his throat, and his hand tightened on the reins. “Because it wasn’t enough. Every time I imagined my knife slitting his throat, it didn’t give me what I needed. Death was too quick. The longer I planned for the day, the more I wanted. I wanted him to suffer. Know. I wanted him to watch everything he had denied me slip from his fingers one piece at a time. I wanted him to die in a hundred different ways, slowly, agonizingly, day by day, the way I had when I begged on street corners, terrified that I wouldn’t bring in enough to satisfy the animals he sold me to. I wanted him to feel as sharp a lash as the one he took to me.”

“You said it was beggars who beat you.”

“They did, but only after he laid the first marks, and those were the deepest ones.”

I flinched at the cruelty he had suffered, but the horror of how long he had planned and hungered for vengeance left a sickening lump in my throat. I swallowed. “And you still want this?”

He nodded without hesitation. “Yes, I still wish him dead, but now there’s something else that I want even more.” He turned to face me, worried lines fanning out from his eyes. “I don’t want any more innocents to die. The Komizar will spare no one, not Pauline, Berdi, or Gwyneth—no one. I don’t want them to die, Lia.… and I don’t want you to die.” He looked at me as if he could see death’s pallor on my face already.

My stomach rolled. I thought of the last words Venda had spoken to me, the missing verses someone had torn from the book, Jezelia, whose life