Stormbreak (Seafire #3) - Natalie C. Parker Page 0,66
hollows beneath his eyes, but when he looked at her, there was no drug haze layered over his bright brown eyes. Of course not. If Tassos was running through his own supply, why would he continue to give it to his prisoners?
“What are you doing here?” Donnally’s voice was thin from disuse, his body weak from coming off Silt, but he looked alert and sharp and so much like their father from the long slope of his nose to the squared corners of his chin. Caledonia had a sudden flash of their mother running one finger down the bridge of that nose and tapping once on the tip, saying, “Tall as a mast.” For a second, it was all Caledonia could do to draw a single breath.
“I came to ask you that same question,” she said, regretting instantly that she’d moved into the position of interrogator. “But we don’t have to start there. If you don’t want to.”
“Where else would we start?” Donnally’s eyes darted between her and the door. “I guess you’re not a prisoner. Tassos wouldn’t let you near me if that was the case.” A sudden look of understanding landed on his features and a disbelieving laugh fell from his lips. “An alliance. Well, I have to hand it to you, Caledonia, you have always made bold moves.”
“There is no other way to resist Lir,” Caledonia answered defensively.
The nod of Donnally’s head was measured. The movement dislodged his curls just enough to reveal the bottom edge of his family sigil, the matching arrowhead to her own. “You can’t trust Tassos, you know.”
Caledonia ground her teeth together. She wanted to demand he tell her why he’d chosen Lir over her. She wanted to know why, after all this time, he wasn’t overjoyed to see her again. How was it so easy for him to look at her and not want to stay with her?
“And you won’t want to be here when Lir comes back,” Donnally said.
“Are you so sure he will?”
“For Silt. For me.”
“Donnally!” Caledonia couldn’t stand it anymore and dove forward, landing on her knees to pull his hands into her own. “Stop protecting him or working for him or whatever it is you’re doing. I’m here! I came back for you. You never have to go back, and no matter what Tassos says, I will get you out of this cell. You don’t have to be a Bullet anymore!”
Donnally gazed down on his sister with a kind of maddening sympathy. “Caledonia.” He said her name and stopped, biting down on whatever he’d meant to say next.
She held firm to his hands and forced herself to be calm when she spoke again. “I lost you once long ago and once again in Cloudbreak. I don’t want to lose you again. Do you remember how Mom taught us to find lost things? To retrace our steps until something reminded us where we’d lost it, or we just got lucky. You were better at it than me. You always remembered and I only ever got lucky. I just promised never to lose anything I’d need to find again. I didn’t realize I’d lost you at first and I’m so sorry it took me this long to figure it out.”
The knot of his throat plunged as he swallowed some strong emotion. His eyes lost the lines of tension around the corners and he seemed to remember the children they’d been. At least, that’s what she wanted to believe. “I thought you were dead.”
“I know.” A sudden pang of loss crashed over her, along with the sharpest edge of memory, of waking up the morning after she’d spotted his gray coat flapping at the top of a Bullet pike, unable to decide if the wound in her gut was worse than the one in her heart. She knew the pain he’d felt, but she also knew the joy of discovering her brother was alive. “But I wasn’t. I’m not. I’m here. Go with me.”
“Lir—” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could not bear to see her face when he said, “He’s my brother.”
Those words. They fell around Caledonia’s wrists like manacles, making her as much a prisoner as he was. It was what he’d said in Cloudbreak and what he said so often in her dreams. Always in them, he was just out of reach or moving away, his sorrow at leaving her never enough.
She felt the tears on her cheeks before she could do anything to stop them.