The Blood of Darkness

Chapter 60

Val

I'm losing hope again.

I've gone through at least a dozen books with no luck, no relevant information whatsoever, just lengthy ruminations, questioning, and rhetoric. And half of the language is so vague—or just aged—that even if the Divine were mentioned, it would be easy for me to glean right past it. My head is full of words, questions with no answers, and I'm so frustrated I can hardly think.

This isn't the end, I tell myself. There will be more research we can do in Asilo. So why doesn't it feel like it?

I feel so resigned I'm barely even reading the pages of the book I'm flipping through. With every crash of thunder roaring from outside, I feel more and more on edge. It feels like a warning, and I have never wanted one less.

When I physically flinch due to a particularly loud thunderbolt, Kye, who I wasn't aware was even watching me, gently takes the book out of my hands. "Hey," is all he says.

I just look at him.

"Are you tired?" he asks, reaching out mindlessly to tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear, then smoothing a hand down my neck. It takes remarkable composure for me not to melt into his soft, deliberate touch. "You can go to sleep. I know tomorrow will be—"

I shake my head. "I doubt I'll be able to sleep tonight." For numerous reasons, most prominently including the shitshow tomorrow could turn into, the prospect of my upcoming death, and the fact that I'm in a castle—I spent a year being tortured in one, so I don't feel particularly safe. I don't think that I'll ever feel even close to safe in a castle again.

"Okay," Kye says simply. "I'll stay up with you."

"No. You at least need to sleep." You need to sleep because you barely slept last night thanks to me and you can't be tired tomorrow. If you're tired you won't be as focused and if you're not focused then you'll get hurt and if you get hurt I don't know what I'll do because I don't exactly have anything else of value to bargain away; not even my life.

But Kye shakes his head. "I need to stay with you." And I'm not really in the mood to start arguing with him since that never ends well. I always end up saying things that I don't mean.

Kye pauses, dropping his hand, studying my face, as if thinking. Then, out of nowhere, I guess trying to distract me: "You know, Lake didn't betray us."

We haven't talked about him in so long that it's a shock to even just hear his name.

When I don't respond or react right away, Kye continues, as if I need an explanation. "His last words...before he died, after Arden impaled him...he begged me not to tell Neve the truth. He wanted her to hate him. So she would feel less pain when she heard about his death."

I take my book back from him, just so I have something to hold. "I know."

Kye's brows shoot up in twin arcs. "What?"

"I know. If he had betrayed us, you would have talked about him more during those weeks after everything happened. You would have been angry. You weren't. You were sad and tired and grieving and trying to hide it."

My tone is rather clipped. I want to dismiss the subject of Lake. For weeks, I've successfully avoided thinking about the kind-hearted guard who rescued me from the hell I was living—surviving—in in Nieves. I'm certainly not in the mood to talk about him now. And talking about Lake means inevitably talking about the Pyrrhos Inn, and I can't hear the name of that place without remembering the exact moment Kye died, the exact moment his hand went limp and his chest started rising and falling and—