“You did what you had to do to survive.” He pushed back his mask. “Kestrel wanted you to live, Rune. Don’t throw away the gift she gave you.”
She glanced sharply away from him. You’re wrong.
It was no gift, being allowed to live while the one you loved most was dead—because of you.
Rune remembered the day they killed her. Kestrel Winters didn’t cower and beg like a criminal. She stood before her killers with the dignity and poise of a queen. When Rune went to the purge, she wanted to go exactly like that. Knowing she’d done everything she could to deliver other witches from Nan’s fate.
“Sometimes it feels like you’re afraid to look at me,” said Alex. Placing his warm hands on her cheeks, below her mask, he tilted her face back to his. “Is it because I don’t want to hurt you? Or hunt you? Or watch you die?”
His grip was firm. Resolved.
“Do you believe you deserve those things, Rune?”
Looking at him was like watching an opera she didn’t like. One of those ridiculous comedies where the character got everything she’d ever dreamed of and lived happily ever after. Those operas were so unrealistic, they always made Rune want to cry. Or stand up and leave.
Sometimes, she got the same feeling looking at Alex.
He gently let go of her face and pushed back her mask. As if he wanted her to look at him.
“Rune …”
A sudden rattling at the door made him step sharply away from her. Alex grabbed his jacket to drop over Rune’s shoulders, to hide her bandaged arm, but it was too late.
Verity burst in.
“Here you are.” Their friend’s brown curls were loose around her shoulders, and the scarlet dress she wore made her white skin paler than usual. “If I have to listen to Bart Wentholt wax poetic about his shoe collection again, I’m going to scream. Does it never occur to him that nobody cares?”
She halted, glancing from Alex to Rune.
“What happened to your arm?”
TWENTY-SIX
GIDEON
GIDEON LEFT HIS HORSE with the stable hand and strode through the gilt doors of Oakhaven Park. A small chandelier winked overhead, sending fractured light over the guests in the front foyer, all of them waiting for staff to pull up their carriages. On either side of Gideon were twin marble staircases, both leading to the second floor of Octavia Creed’s home.
Gideon had fought alongside her husband, the Good Commander, at the New Dawn. The Commander was only Nicolas Creed then. A simple soldier in the palace guard.
They’d met years ago, in a boxing club, when Gideon was getting the shit kicked out of him nightly. Those matches always ended the same way: with Gideon hauling his bruised body from the floor of the ring, dragging himself to a table at the bar in the back, and pretending not to notice the sneering men around him. All of them disgusted by his presence. Witch’s whore, they’d called him. They didn’t want Gideon in their ring. But neither would they throw him out, fearing Cressida’s wrath.
Since they couldn’t get rid of him, the men took turns beating Gideon to a pulp night after night. Taking out their anger and hate on a target Gideon was happy to provide them.
Really, they were doing him a favor.
Gideon never told Cressida how he came by the bruises, and she either didn’t care, or pretended not to.
One night, after crawling out of her bed like the insect he was, Gideon noticed a man old enough to be his father watching from across the bar as Gideon drank himself into oblivion before a match.
While the other men spat on Gideon when they walked by, this man only stared. He assumed the guy would wait for Gideon to leave, follow him out to the alley, and finish whatever the boys didn’t finish in the ring. Sometimes, they did that. These men who hated him.
He caught the man’s eye, welcoming it.
When Gideon’s match started, he was already high from the laudanum in his blood. His vision blurred and his body swayed, but he could still feel the man’s gaze on him. When he lay on the floor afterward—numb despite the punches he’d taken, feeling none of the welts coming up on his skin, unable to taste the blood in his mouth—it was this man who stopped them from dumping Gideon next to the refuse out back, where they usually put him.
Instead, he helped Gideon over to a private table and ordered him food. As the room spun, Gideon lay his bloody head down on the sticky tabletop, wishing his opponent had broken a bone this time, because maybe then he would feel something.
“If one day you wake up and decide you want to hit back,” said the man across from him, “come find me.” He wrote an address down, pressed it into Gideon’s open palm, and folded his limp fingers over the paper.