At the end of the day, despite Vik and Justinian, despite the brutal end that would come his way, it was the sight of Bryce’s face that haunted him. The sight of the tears he’d caused.
He’d promised her a future and then brought that pain and despair and sorrow to her face. He’d never hated himself more.
Isaiah’s fingers lifted toward the bars, as if he’d reach for Hunt’s hand, but then lowered back to his side. “I will.”
“It’s been three days,” Lehabah said. “And the Governor hasn’t announced what he’s doing with Athie.”
Bryce looked up from the book she was reading in the library. “Turn off that television.”
Lehabah did no such thing, her glowing face fixed on the tablet’s screen. The news footage of the Comitium lobby and the now-rotting corpse of the triarii soldier crucified there. The blood-crusted glass box beneath it. Despite the endless bullshitting by the news anchors and analysts, no information had leaked regarding why two of Micah’s top soldiers had been so brutally executed. A failed coup was all that had been suggested. No mention of Hunt. Whether he lived.
“He’s alive,” Lehabah whispered. “I know he is. I can feel it.”
Bryce ran a finger over a line of text. It was the tenth time she’d attempted to read it in the twenty minutes since the messenger had left, dropping off a vial of the antidote from the medwitch who’d taken the kristallos venom from her leg. Apparently, she’d found the way to make the antidote work without her being present. But Bryce didn’t marvel. Not when the vial was just a silent reminder of what she and Hunt had shared that day.
She’d debated throwing it out, but had opted to lock the antidote in the safe in Jesiba’s office, right next to that six-inch golden bullet for the Godslayer Rifle. Life and death, salvation and destruction, now entombed there together.
“Violet Kappel said on the morning news that there might be more would-be rebels—”
“Turn off that screen, Lehabah, before I throw it in the fucking tank.”
Her sharp words cut through the library. The rustling creatures in their cages stilled. Even Syrinx stirred from his nap.
Lehabah dimmed to a faint pink. “Are you sure there’s nothing we can—”
Bryce slammed the book shut and hauled it with her, aiming for the stairs.
She didn’t hear Lehabah’s next words over the front door’s buzzer. Work had proved busier than usual, a grand total of six shoppers wasting her time asking about shit they had no interest in buying. If she had to deal with one more idiot today—
She glanced at the monitors. And froze.
The Autumn King surveyed the gallery, the showroom stocked with priceless artifacts, the door that led up to Jesiba’s office and the window in it that overlooked the floor. He stared at the window for long enough that Bryce wondered if he could somehow see through the one-way glass, all the way to the Godslayer Rifle mounted on the wall behind Jesiba’s desk. Sense its deadly presence, and that of the golden bullet in the wall safe beside it. But his eyes drifted on, to the iron door sealed to her right, and finally, finally to Bryce herself.
He’d never come to see her. In all these years, he’d never come. Why bother?
“There are cameras everywhere,” she said, staying seated behind her desk, hating every whiff of his ashes-and-nutmeg scent that dragged her back twelve years, to the weeping thirteen-year-old she’d been the last time she’d spoken to him. “In case you’re thinking of stealing something.”
He ignored the taunt and slid his hands into the pockets of his black jeans, still conducting his silent survey of the gallery. He was gorgeous, her father. Tall, muscled, with an impossibly beautiful face beneath that long red hair, the exact same shade and silken texture as her own. He looked just a few years older than her, too—dressed like a young man, with those black jeans and a matching long-sleeved T-shirt. But his amber eyes were ancient and cruel as he said at last, “My son told me what occurred on the river on Wednesday night.”
How he managed to make that slight emphasis on my son into an insult was beyond her.
“Ruhn is a good dog.”
“Prince Ruhn deemed it necessary that I know, since you might be … in peril.”
“And yet you waited three days? Were you hoping I’d be crucified, too?”
Her father’s eyes flashed. “I have come to tell you that your security has been assured, and that the Governor knows you were innocent in the matter and will not dare to harm you. Even to punish Hunt Athalar.”