I wish to trade my place.
And so it had been done.
Bryce had not felt any different afterward, when she’d been sent back over the river. Or in the days after that. Even her mother had not been able to tell—hadn’t noticed that Bryce had snuck from her hotel room in the dead of night.
In the two years since, Bryce had sometimes wondered if she’d dreamed it, but then she’d look through the drawer in the gallery where all the old coins were kept and see the empty, dark spot where the Death Mark had been. Jesiba had never noticed it was gone.
Bryce liked to think of her chance at eternal rest as missing with it. To imagine the coins nestled in their velvet compartments in the drawer as all the souls of those she loved, dwelling together forever. And there was hers—missing and drifting, wiped away the moment she died.
But what Sabine had claimed about Danika suffering in the Bone Quarter … Bryce refused to believe it. Because the alternative—No. Danika had deserved to go to the Bone Quarter, had nothing to be ashamed about, whether Sabine or the other assholes disagreed or not. Whether the Under-King or whoever the Hel deemed their souls worthy disagreed or not.
Bryce ran her hand through Hunt’s silken hair, the sounds of his breathing filling the room.
It sucked. This stupid fucking world they lived in.
It sucked, and it was full of awful people. And the good ones always paid for it.
She pulled her phone from the nightstand and began typing out a message.
She fired it off a moment later, not giving herself time to reconsider what she’d written to Ithan. Her first message to him in two years. His frantic messages from that horrible night, then his cold order to stay away, were still the last things in a thread that went back five years before that.
You tell your Alpha that Connor never bothered to notice her because he always knew what a piece of shit she was. And tell Sabine that if I see her again, I will kill her.
Bryce lay down next to Hunt, not daring to touch his ravaged back.
Her phone buzzed. Ithan had written, I had no part in what went down today.
Bryce wrote back, You disgust me. All of you.
Ithan didn’t reply, and she put her phone on silent before she let out a long breath and leaned her brow against Hunt’s shoulder.
She’d find a way to make this right. Somehow. Someday.
Hunt’s eyes cracked open, pain a steady throb through him. Its sharpness was dulled—likely by some sort of potion or concoction of drugs.
The steady counterweight that should have been on his back was gone. The emptiness hit him like a semitruck. But soft, feminine breathing filled the darkness. A scent like paradise filled his nose, settled him. Soothed the pain.
His eyes adjusted to the dark enough to know that he was in Bryce’s bedroom. That she was lying beside him. Medical supplies and vials lay next to the bed. All for him, many looking used. The clock read four in the morning. How many hours had she sat up, tending to him?
Her hands were tucked in at her chest, as if she had fallen asleep beseeching the gods.
He mouthed her name, his tongue as dry as sandpaper.
Pain rippled through his body, but he managed to stretch out an arm. Managed to slide it over her waist and tuck her into him. She made a soft sound and nuzzled her head into his neck.
Something deep in him shifted and settled. What she’d said and done today, what she’d revealed to the world in her pleading for him … It was dangerous. For both of them. So, so dangerous.
If he were wise, he’d find somehow to pull away. Before this thing between them met its inevitable, horrible end. As all things in the Republic met a horrible end.
And yet Hunt couldn’t bring himself to remove his arm. To avoid the instinct to breathe in her scent and listen to her soft breathing.
He didn’t regret it, what he’d done. Not one bit of it.
But there might come a day when that wouldn’t be true. A day that might dawn very soon.
So Hunt savored the feel of Bryce. Her scent and breathing.
Savored every second of it.
63
“Is Athie okay, BB?”
Bryce rubbed her eyes as she studied the computer screen in the gallery library. “He’s sleeping it off.”
Lehabah had cried this morning when Bryce had trudged in to tell her what had occurred. She’d barely noticed that her leg had no pain—not a whisper. She’d wanted to stay home, to care for Hunt, but when she’d called Jesiba, the answer had been clear: No.
She’d spent the first half of the morning filling out job applications.
And had sent each and every one of them in.