Zodiac Academy Fated Throne - Caroline Peckham Page 0,208

coffin.

“Don’t be,” he sighed. “He died a long time ago.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not sad anymore,” I said with a frown, moving to his side and brushing my fingers against his arm. He glanced at me and our eyes met, the air thickening between us.

He reached down into the coffin, carefully checking around the body. I moved along the edge of it, hunting the dark space, urging Phoenix flames in my hands to see by.

“It’s not here,” Orion growled.

“It must be,” I insisted, starting to move around the tomb, searching everywhere.

Orion shot around too, checking anywhere that could hide a compartment, but there was nothing, just four cold stone walls.

“Why would the diary lead you here if it’s gone?” I asked in frustration, carefully searching around the body again. “Could someone have gotten here before us?”

“There’s no way,” he growled fiercely. “How could they have gotten through that door?”

I shook my head, confused and furious as I continued hunting, but there was no compartment or hatch or anything. It was just an empty tomb and the sarcophagus.

“There has to be something we’re missing,” I said stubbornly, looking to Orion but he didn’t have an answer. “Maybe you needed to come here with Tory…”

“No,” Orion growled. “It was meant to be you, I’m sure of it.”

“Why?” I balked, moving to the door and pressing my hands against it, shoving with all my strength, but without my air magic I had no chance of opening it. Shit, how the hell do we get out? “It could be her. Or both of us, or-”

“It’s you,” he snapped. “It’s me and you, that was how this was meant to be.”

“Says the guy who abandoned me,” I scoffed. “We clearly weren’t meant to be anything.”

“I didn’t abandon you,” he said in disbelief, shooting to my side as he shoved the door too, adding the power of his Order, but it wouldn’t give. Shit.

“Right,” I said bitterly. “You just thought heading off to Darkmore and leaving me to pick up the pieces of our ruined relationship was a great way to show your support for me?”

“I had no choice,” he snarled and I wheeled around to face him.

“If you say that one more time, I’m going to blast your head off with Phoenix fire.”

His eyes darkened, narrowing to slits. “You don’t understand,” he hissed.

“I understand perfectly actually. I understand that you betrayed me, that you broke my trust. The one thing you knew was nearly impossible for me to give you. But I did, because I thought I could rely on you, that you would always be there. But you stopped fighting for me and I was the idiot who was actually surprised.”

“I never stopped fighting for you, Blue,” he growled, boxing me in against the wall and my heart clenched at the use of that name. “I just stopped fighting for us.”

“Same difference,” I said icily as fire blazed in my palms in warning, but he didn’t back down.

“Wrong,” he snapped in his damn professor tone and I held my breath, wondering if he was actually going to give me an explanation at last. “Everything I did was for you. And I would do it again and again, because despite how much this fucking kills me, you’re still on the right path to become a queen of Solaria. And if I’d done anything different, you would have lost your place at Zodiac Academy, your name would be ruined by your relationship to me. I was going to prison either way, and I saw one way that wouldn’t drag you down with me. So I took it. And if that makes me an asshole then I don’t give a fuck. If you hate me for the rest of my life, I will swallow it because I will not be the reason you lost your chance to claim the throne.”

Tears blurred my vision but I blinked them back as anger welled up in me. “You had no right to make that choice for me.”

“I know,” he said in a grim tone. “I didn’t take pleasure in it. But I’d still make it every time.”

I shook my head at him, my heart thundering furiously against my ribs. “And didn’t you even consider what you going to prison would do to me? How much it hurt knowing you were in that fucking place, that you could have died in there, and that everyone in the kingdom thinks of you as some goddamn predator who manipulated me?” I shoved him