And I missed him too much to hate him the way I wanted to.
And I hated him most of all for that.
All at once, exhaustion fell over me. My flames shriveled away. Raihn still held my shoulders. He was so close that our faces were only inches apart. It would be so easy to lean forward and fall against his chest. If this was the version of him I had known in the Kejari, maybe I would have done that. Let him support me for a little while.
But it wasn’t.
“Look at me, Oraya.”
I didn’t want to. I shouldn’t. I’d see too much. He’d see too much. I should pull away from him.
Instead, I lifted my head, and Raihn’s stare, red as dried blood, nailed me to the wall.
“I spent seventy years trapped by the worst of vampire power,” he said. “And I spent so much of that time trying to make them make sense. But they don’t. Rishan. Hiaj. Nightborn. Shadowborn. Bloodborn. Hell, fucking gods. It doesn’t matter. Neculai Vasarus was—” His throat bobbed. “Evil doesn’t even cover it. And for a long time, I thought he didn’t love anything. I was wrong. He did love his wife. He loved her, and he hated that he loved her. He loved her so much he choked the life out of her.”
Raihn’s eyes had drifted far away—drifted somewhere in the past that I knew, just from the look on his face, hurt him to stare at directly.
“There’s nothing they’re more afraid of than love,” he murmured. “They’ve been taught their entire lives that every true connection is nothing but a danger to them.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Why?”
Because I was still stuck on this—on this idea that Vincent had been afraid of me. This idea that went against everything I had ever known.
His mouth twisted into a wry smirk. “Love is fucking terrifying,” he murmured. “I think that’s true no matter who you are.”
I stilled.
There was something about the way he said that—the closeness of him, the steadiness of his stare—that jolted me back to my senses.
What was I doing?
Why was I showing him this? Raihn was my kidnapper. He had lied to me. He had used me.
Raihn had murdered my father.
And now he was lecturing me about the sanctity of love?
He was right. Love was terrifying. To be so vulnerable to another person. And I’d— I stopped that thought.
No. Whatever I had felt for Raihn was not love.
But it had been vulnerable. More vulnerable than I ever should have let myself become.
And look at how I’d paid for it.
Look at how my father had paid for it.
My anger, my grief, drained away. In its place was the thick burn of shame.
I yanked away from Raihn’s touch and tried not to notice the flicker of disappointment on his face.
“I’d like to be alone,” I said.
My voice was harsh. A finality.
Silence. Then he said, “It’s dangerous out here.”
“I can handle it.”
He paused. Unconvinced, I knew.
I wouldn’t look at him, but I knew if I did, he’d have that look on his face—that fucking look, like he wanted to say something that would be too earnest, too real.
“Just go,” I said. It sounded more like a plea than I wanted it to. But maybe that was what made him listen.
“Alright,” he said softly, and the sound of his wings faded off into the night.
24
ORAYA
I sat on top of those towering ruins for a long time, trying and failing to feel nothing.
The sky slowly warmed, cold moonlight replaced by the gold touch of dawn, revealing all the ugliest truths of this city.
He had been so eager to forget this place. But this place never forgot him. Never recovered from the nonchalant cruelty of his departure.
I hated how familiar that felt.
All of it was like the room that Evelaena now kept as a twisted shrine to him. Nothing but discarded trash, and she projected such meaning onto it. A shoe. A hairbrush. A stupid scribble of ink—
I blinked.
A scribble of ink.
Recognition nagged at the back of my mind. Somewhere I had seen this view before—
I stood, then took several steps back, watching the way the landscape shifted with my perspective. The sea a bit to the right, the tower slightly overlapping it…
No. Not quite. But close.
I closed my eyes and pictured it: the ink drawing on Vincent’s desk, perfectly preserved for centuries.
Then I opened my eyes and peered around the edge. Another tower stood just slightly to the south of this one—it somehow managed to look even older. But by my estimation, the viewpoint would line up. If I was right… the sketch of Lahor that Vincent had made might’ve been drawn from those ruins.