Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Twenty-Three

I told Yuuhi I just needed a moment to myself. His fingers collected mine. His eyes told me he trusted me. Sometimes I didn't even trust me, but this time, I did only need a moment.

I sat on the edge of my bed with my nails digging into my jeans, the bits of ice crusted to my boots melting into the carpet. The lights were off. The black wall of a window stared at me. I listened to my own breaths, slow and steady and too deep, as if I were sleeping.

Jason had been so sure that we'd have a break.

He'd been so sure that Cassius would have enough on his plate with the fall of a king and appealing to the public.

Something had changed.

Something must have put Cassius in a position he didn't want to be in—a position of check, struggling to evade checkmate.

I closed my eyes. I took a breath. I let it out.

In the periphery of my thoughts, I sensed Toivo climb the stairs. I sensed him when he stopped with one foot inside my room and one foot out, and I sensed the girl with him, pulsing with power like a heartbeat outside of his body.

"I can see him," he said.

My eyelids lifted. She stood just behind him, as if she were only a child hiding behind someone stronger than her. Big eyes stared back at me, amber like her brother's, glassy as if spirits could cry, glassy as if she already knew what had happened to Jason, Ave and Elliot.

Julas stood beside me, the first time I had let him into my sight in a while, and I realized she wasn't looking at me, but him, and he looked at her, and they spoke in a language that had no words. Toivo entered and took a seat beside me, the entire bed wheezing with his weight. His hands were so tense, the scabs of his burns already so miraculously healed, but his fingers rubbed raw from constant wringing. His eyes were heavy.

We were both so tired.

So tired.

His jaw grinded open. "Kali, I...I don't know what's about to happen, and I wanted to make sure we at least fully clear the air, just in case..."

Just in case something bad did happen.

It must have been harder for him than it was for me. His demon sense had alerted him the moment something happened to Ave and Elliot and Jason, and he couldn't offer anything better than, 'It's hazy.' But even that haziness gnawed quietly at the back of his mind, spreading ice into the marrow of his bones, freezing him where he would never thaw.

He swallowed, his throat clenching. "You were right, after all. I can't...protect you forever. I need to trust that you can protect yourself. I need to trust that you know how to. I think it'll be a harder sell for Carmi, because he's...well, he's scared of us now. Isn't he?"

"He is." Guilt welled up in my stomach, hot and cold and burning all the same. I toyed with the bracelet. "I think he's the most afraid of being left behind, of us leaving him behind."

A small laugh left him and he shook his head, spilling the silver of his ponytail across the sheets. "And to think, he was the one who was always telling me what to do when I had the real emotional maturity of a ten-year-old."

"Like that day at the school, right?"

"What were we even arguing about?" He laughed again, drawing a weak smile to my lips as well. "I don't remember anymore, it was so...long ago. The longest few months of our lives."