understand what had just happened. While Veronyka understood the voice inside his mind to be Val’s, she wasn’t sure how someone without shadow magic experienced its use. To him, it might have been an incoherent rumble, a sudden, unconscious desire, or maybe the sensation that his own thoughts were spiraling out of control.
“Tristan, what promise?” Veronyka pressed, afraid of what Val might have done to his mind and his memory.
“You can’t trust a word he says,” Val began, but Veronyka cut her off.
“No. I can’t trust you,” she spat. “Tristan, please.”
He cast a wary look at Val before facing Veronyka. He seemed to have come back to himself, though he plainly struggled to understand everything that was going on. “Don’t be angry, Nyk. Your sister, she was worried about you, that’s all. Didn’t want you involved in the fighting unless you absolutely had to be. So I promised I’d keep you off the wall and out of danger.”
His voice was pleading, but Veronyka didn’t have an ounce of feeling to spare for him. She whirled on her sister.
Val didn’t want her safe—she wanted her excluded, and most of all, she wanted her to feel completely, utterly alone.
Suddenly, everything came together in Veronyka’s mind. This is what I’ve been waiting for. . . .
Val had known the soldiers were coming.
It was a horrifying thought, but Veronyka felt its truth immediately. Hadn’t Val arrived at the Eyrie mere days before them? There’s no way a shadowmage as accomplished as Val could fail to notice hundreds of soldiers climbing the mountain nearby. Veronyka always kept her magic close, guarded, and internal, but Val stretched her magic wide like a net. This was why she’d wanted Veronyka to leave right away, why she’d been so insistent. She didn’t warn the Riders so they could prepare; she kept the information to herself, gambling countless lives so she could have Veronyka back under her control.
Since she’d arrived, Val had worked hard to sow fear and doubt into Veronyka’s heart. She’d insulted the Riders, questioning their motives and their loyalties, and criticized Veronyka for serving them. When Xephyra appeared and was put into the breeding cages, Val was even closer to her goal. Going after Tristan, asking him not to let Veronyka fight, was the final move to strip her sister of everything that made her happy. All this heartache, all this agony, so that when this moment came, Veronyka would have nothing to hold on to.
“Did you know she had come back?” Veronyka asked her sister. It was the one thing she hadn’t yet figured out, the last question that needed answering. She’d tried to ask before, but had let Val get by with deflections and vague answers. Not this time.
Val seemed surprised by the change in subject, but she lifted her chin, eyes blazing. “Yes.”
“And you led her here . . . to me?” Veronyka’s tone was flat, emotionless.
“Yes.”
“How?” Veronyka asked, a slow, steady heat climbing up her throat.
Val shrugged, the gesture so careless, so dismissive, that Veronyka had to clench her jaw to stop from breathing fire.
“You’re impatient, Nyka, always have been. Resurrections are not for the faint of heart. It was a full week before she made her return. The phoenix sought you out, but I was the one who was there. It was no small thing, to keep her under my control, but I managed it. She followed you, and I followed her. Now here we are.”
Veronyka’s entire body was burning now, the scorching flames devouring her insides, begging for release. Val had called her “Nyka” right in front of Tristan, but it seemed almost trivial in the face of everything else.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Veronyka demanded.
“I tried,” Val bit out. “I told you I’d brought you a gift. But you wanted nothing to do with me, remember? So I called her here instead.”
Veronyka finished the sentence in her head: to try to get you kicked out, only they stuck Xephyra in a cage instead.
She shook her head slowly, sifting through Val’s words for the heart of her confusion. “How could you control her—how could you call her here? It shouldn’t be possible. You’re not bonded to her.”
Tristan latched on to the word “bonded,” his gaze flicking toward the females’ enclosure, but Veronyka was too preoccupied to care.
Val tilted her head, considering Veronyka for a moment. Then, deep in the back of Veronyka’s mind, a door burst open.
Instantly she knew what it was—a permanent connection to Val. It was a kind