Obvious.
He didn’t need to finish. I understood him.
Raihn, someone who had known me for less than a year, had seen that potential in me. And it was him—my enemy, someone who had every reason to cage me—who opened the door for me to seize that power.
The truth I didn’t want to look at now stared me in the face, impossible to ignore, no matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut.
In the darkness, I saw Vincent the night of the Halfmoon ball, when we had danced together. He’d been so uncharacteristically sentimental that night. So affectionate.
I had asked him why he never took me flying.
And I remembered now, as clearly as if he was standing in front of me all over again, what he had said: The last thing I wanted was for you to think you could and start throwing yourself off of balconies.
I choked out, “He knew.”
He knew. He always knew.
It wasn’t about protecting me. He didn’t want me to jump because he didn’t want me to find out I could catch myself.
That night, he had been so sentimental because he knew he was about to order the slaughter of Salinae. He knew he was about to kill any hope I had of finding any family I had left.
He knew, and he knew he was about to lie to me, and he knew he was going to lose me for it.
He knew all of it.
“He knew.” The words ripped from my throat, shaking with tears and jagged sobs. “He knew, and he never—he never told me, he never—why?”
Raihn murmured, “No one can answer that question.”
In a fit of rage, my head snapped up, my anger strong enough to drown out my self-consciousness. I probably looked like a wild animal, face ruddy and tear-streaked, mouth twisted into a snarl.
“Don’t fucking pity me,” I hissed. “Give me one honest thing, Raihn Ashraj. I want to hear someone say it.”
I was tired of performances and lies. Tired of dancing around the fucking truth. I craved honesty the way a flower craved sunlight. I even craved the pain of it, driven deep into my heart.
Raihn’s face shifted.
For all his faults, he didn’t pity me. He didn’t hide the truth.
“I think Vincent was very afraid of you, Oraya.”
“Afraid?” I let out a choked laugh. “He’s—he was the Nightborn King. And I’m just—”
“You aren’t ‘just’ anything. You were his Heir. You were the most dangerous person in the world to him. And I think he was terrified of you because of it.”
It sounded unbelievable. Absurd.
“Look at this.”
I leapt to my feet, thrusting my hand out to the view of Lahor below us—this dead, pathetic, broken city, a mere ghost of what it once was.
Just like me.
Raihn had taken half a step back, and I realized, dimly, that Nightfire now engulfed my hands, blazing up my arms. I noticed this very distantly, as if I was standing far outside my body.
“Look at what he did to this place,” I ground out. “He killed dozens of people the day he left. He killed children he partially raised. Children that didn’t even truly pose a threat to him. Just because he was that fucking thorough.”
It is important to be thorough and cautious, little serpent.
How many times had he said that to me?
I was talking so fast I could barely breathe, my words rough-hewn by anger. “So why would he let me live, if I was so dangerous? Why didn’t he kill me the day he found me? Instead of—instead of taking me home and lying to me for almost twenty years. Why wouldn’t he just kill me instead of caging me, instead of breaking me—”
Suddenly, Raihn was right in front of me, so close the Nightfire surely had to burn. If it hurt, he didn’t show it. His hands gripped my shoulders, tight.
“You are not broken.” I’d never heard him sound so furious, though his voice didn’t rise at all. “You are not broken. Oraya. Do you understand me?”
No. I didn’t. Because I was broken. Just like Lahor was broken. I was just as broken as this city and its ruins and ghosts. Just as broken as Evelaena and her two-hundred-year-old scar and her twisted obsession with the man who gave it to her. What fucking right did I have to judge her for that when I was no different?
Vincent had ruined me. He had saved me. He had loved me. He had stifled me. He had manipulated me. He had made me everything that I was. Everything that I could be.
Even the greatest parts of my power, the parts he never wanted me to find, were his.
And now here I was, poring over every wound he gave me. And no matter how much they hurt, I never wanted them to heal, because they were his.