Page 97 of This Dark Descent
Reid stared at the glittering ring in her palm. She watched the last of his reserve break. “You told her.”
“No matter what he’s done for you, it doesn’t make what else he does right,” she whispered, no longer sure who she was trying to convince. She couldn’t ignore what she’d seen. She couldn’t just close her eyes. But she wanted to, more than anything.
Reid reached for the ring. She nearly pulled back, but he plucked it from her palm. “You have no idea what he’s done.” He turned his back on her. “Just go home, Mikira.”
The words felt like a slap in the face. The walls she’d built around herself, the ones that had slowly crumbled the last few weeks, rose once more. She let them cut her off, let them seal her away, and fled into the lavender-scented night, seeking the one place she could think of that felt safe.
Atara welcomed her with a hot huff of air as Mikira slid into her stall. She threw her arms about the horse’s neck, holding fast and holding still as the world spiraled out of control around her.
Reid would tell Damien she couldn’t be trusted. He wouldn’t stop her from riding in the Illinir—too much rested on her winning—but what about after? Would he keep her share of the money? Ruin what remained of her family’s business? Damien Adair was not known for his forgiveness.
And the look in Reid’s eyes—the betrayal.
Mikira released Atara, falling back against the wall and sliding to the ground. She hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in them, struggling to make sense of things she didn’t understand.
A soft nose brushed the side of her face, and she looked up into Atara’s knowing gaze. The horse dropped her head, and Mikira leaned her forehead against hers like she used to with Iri, and for the first time in a long time, she let herself break.
IT WAS LATEby the time she arrived home to find Ailene and Nelda laughing by the fire. The color had returned to her sister’s face, and the aroma of Nelda’s cooking wafted from the kitchen. The scene felt like a bubble, as though if she walked in, it would pop and send everything tumbling to the floor.
The thread between her and her family had frayed in recent years, creating a distance between them made of missing people and faded memories. It’d led her to resent herself the way you resented a wounded limb for hurting. It’d left her alone, and in that isolation, she’d turned to the only thing she had left: her anger. She’d wrapped herself in it like armor, told herself she needed no one.
But as much as she’d tried to fight it, her time with Ari, Reid, and even Damien had been like a candle against the dark. It’d eaten away at that loneliness, until she’d felt more a part of something than she’d been in ages.
Now she’d ruined that too.
Mikira stared at the closed door of her father’s study, wishing desperately he were on the other side, until a heavy rapping on the front door startled her. She hadn’t moved from the foyer, rainwater dripping into a growing puddle at her feet.
The knock came again. “Anthir! Open up!”
“Kira?” Nelda appeared in the drawing room arch.
“Stay there,” Mikira ordered before opening the door.
“We have a warrant of search,” said the foremost constable, and before Mikira could protest, they filed inside and dispersed like seeds in the wind.
Talyana was the last to enter, her crisp blue and silver jacket looking out of place in their dimly lit foyer. Her plaited hair fell over her shoulder in a long tail.
Fury rose inside Mikira like a rearing horse. “What is this?”
Talyana winced. “Can we speak in private?”
Mikira stomped toward her father’s study, Talyana on her heel. She hesitated only briefly outside the closed door before throwing it open. For a moment, she simply stood there, the smell of a room long neglected making her heart twist.
The day Rezek took her father away, she’d closed the door and locked the place from her mind, unable to face any little reminder of him. Now moonlight bathed the study, illuminating the chair pushed away from the desk as though he’d left in a hurry, the surface still buried beneath a layer of papers and books. He’d spent many of his nights submerged in words, often reading to Mikira and her sisters about faraway lands and creatures they could scarcely imagine.
A note with her name sat on the desk. Mikira snatched it up and unfolded it, finding a short message in her father’s looping hand:
Kira,
I know you will have so many questions, most of which I cannot answer. I hope this can. Take care of it.
Love,
Your Father
She flipped it over, but there was nothing else. What was she supposed to take care of, the letter? Carefully, she folded it back up and tucked it in her pocket, alongside the note she’d taken from Reid’s room.
“I missed this place.” Talyana’s gaze traveled the room, taking in the bookcases and art depicting foreign landscapes and beasts.
