Page 130 of The First Scar
"Serenya!" The scream tore out of me, savage and jagged. I lunged for the bars.
The captain didn't even glance at me.
"Level four. Isolation," he said to the guards, voice flat and bored. "King wants it loud enough for the Rupture to hear."
The guards shoved her forward, parading her past my cell like a trophy. She stumbled, lifting her head. Her eyes met mine—glassy, unfocused, filled with a terror so profound it stopped my heart.
"Amaria?" she whimpered. A broken sound.
"Let her go!" I hammered my hands against the iron bars. The Quell-Rune flared hot on my Marks, punishment for the surge of emotion, but I didn't care.
Then I saw him.
Standing further back in the corridor, half-swallowed by shadow.
Eryndor.
Just the Crown's perfect weapon, standing where the male used to be.
"Eryndor, look at me!Look at me!"
He briefly gripped the red, worn thread around his wrist until his knuckles turned white. But he didn't move. Didn't stop the captain from dragging the only person I had left into the depths below.
Her sob echoed down the stone corridor, fading into the dark.
Eryndor watched them go. Then, for a heartbeat that stretched into eternity, he looked back at me.
His attention drifted over my shaking hands, the tears tracking through the dirt on my face. His jaw worked. Then—a microscopic shake of his head.
It wasn't anger. It was dismissal.Pathetic,the gesture said.Look at you. Breaking so easily.
It was the look of a male who'd been right about me all along. I wasn't the Scion. I wasn't the cure. I was exactly what the King said I was—the Rupture wearing skin.
I was poison.
Poison to Serenya, who was bleeding because of me. Poison to the Veil, which I had arrogantly thought I could heal when all I ever did was tear it further. I was a threat to his people—to the order he had sworn his life to protect.
He gave me his back. And then the dark took him. The lantern light faded. The footsteps receded.
Drip.
Drip.
I slumped against the hard iron, the silence rushing back in to crush me.
I didn't pray for a way out. Monsters don't get rescued. They get put down.
Chapter 30
AMARIA
The fever took the edges off the world first. Then it took the middle.
I lay on my back, staring at a hairline fracture in the stone ceiling. It went in and out of focus…so severe… then melting, slowly, slower… then snapped back again—like a kaleidoscope spinning of its own accord.
A large, pale spider crawled over the back of my hand.
My eyes dropped to it and I watched its disjointed legs pick their way across my knuckles, feeling the tiny, scratching weight of it against my fevered skin.
