Chapter 3

Cassian bent and lifted Cecilia as though she were made of spun glass.

“Who touched her before she fell?” he demanded. “Anyone besides you?”

I caught a glimpse of the leather pouch beneath Cecilia’s sleeve and finally understood. She had planned every beat of this scene before she ever entered my room.

“She brought something with her.” I pointed toward her waist. “Search the pouch.”

Cecilia curled protectively around it as tears spilled down her cheeks. “It’s only pain medicine. Why do you have to turn even that into something ugly?”

“Evelyn!” Cassian set her down and closed his hand around my throat. “You hurt her, and now you’re trying to pin it on her?”

His fingers tightened.

The air vanished. Darkness crowded the edges of my sight. I didn’t fight him. I only stared at the face inches from mine and thought, [Maybe this is easier.]

If he killed me now, I wouldn’t have to survive the next two days.

Then agony exploded through the fated bond.

It wasn’t my pain. It was his.

When one fated partner deliberately harmed the other, the bond returned the wound. Cassian’s face drained white. The dragon mark over his heart flared crimson and forced his hand open.

I struck the wall. My temple split against stone, and warm blood ran down the side of my face.

“Cassian, what’s wrong?” Cecilia grabbed his arm.

He clutched his chest until the backlash eased, then looked at me again. The pain hadn’t cleared his head. It only fed his anger.

“If I’d known your dragon soul was this vicious, I would’ve cursed fate before letting it bind us.” His voice shook the room. “Get out of Obsidian Keep. I never want to see you again.”

I slid down the wall, and the last unbroken piece of my heart finally gave way.

My mother saw the blood covering my face. Panic flashed in her eyes, and her hand lifted toward me.

Then Cecilia whimpered.

My mother’s hand stopped in midair and turned toward her instead. “It’s all right. I’m taking you to the healing tower.”

I didn’t blame her.

She always believed Cecilia was hurt more badly. She always believed that no matter how frail I looked, I would somehow make it through.

This time, I wouldn’t.

I wiped the blood away with my sleeve and pulled an old traveling case from the corner. I had packed it before going to the Oath Hall.

My parents stared.

My father frowned. “Who are you trying to threaten with another runaway act?”

“We correct you because we want you to do better,” my mother said, exhaustion weighing down her voice. “We haven’t abandoned you, Evelyn. But every time there’s a problem, you run instead of facing it.”

She sounded so sincere. As if all I had to do was stay, apologize, and keep swallowing every lie, and this house would still be mine.

Cassian stood beside the bed, his expression cold. “Where are you going?”

“Out of the Obsidian Court.”

His power dropped over me like a mountain. “Cross the boundary stones, and you are no longer under this Court’s protection. A woman with a fractured dragon core won’t last a month outside.”

I didn’t have a month.

“Then that works out nicely.” I took the handle of my case. My voice sounded strange even to me—quiet, distant, done. “None of you ever truly needed me anyway.”

At the doorway, I paused.

“I swear on the bond that I will never set foot in Obsidian Keep again.”

“If I break that oath, may I lose the only person I have ever loved.”

I walked away without looking back.

Snow was falling outside the Keep. Wind slipped beneath my collar, but for the first time in years, I could breathe.

From the high window, Cassian watched me cross the courtyard.

He knew I couldn’t survive the cold for long. His order to banish me had been spoken in fury. He had never truly imagined I would leave.

He took one step toward the door.

Cecilia rested against the pillows and spoke in a gentle voice. “She’ll be back. Once she learns no one outside these walls will take care of her, she’ll understand that you’ve been protecting her all along.”

“Then she’ll apologize to everyone on her own.”

Cassian said nothing.

He kept staring at the archway where I had disappeared, an unease he couldn’t name tightening in his chest. Only when his nails cut his palms did he realize how hard he had clenched his fists.

I found a cheap inn called the Broken Stag near the edge of the Obsidian territory.

The room was low-ceilinged and damp. Wind hissed through cracks in the wall, and the old bed shrieked whenever I moved. But the innkeeper didn’t require a family seal or ask why a sick dragonkin woman needed a room alone.

Sometime after midnight, pain ripped me out of sleep.

Dragonfire collapse wasn’t a quiet fading. It felt like frozen hooks burrowing into my marrow and tearing apart the channels that anchored my soul to my body.

Curled beneath a thin blanket, I began remembering details I had buried for years.

When I was twelve, Cecilia often volunteered to lay out my training clothes. Every time I wore something she had handled, my skin blistered as if the fabric had caught fire. I couldn’t even hold a sword.

Everyone decided I was too delicate to tolerate rough cloth.

Now I knew she had dusted my shirts with cold-iron powder. Cold iron suppressed dragon blood, and my already weak flame had never stood a chance.

At fourteen, someone shoved me from behind during canyon training.

I tumbled down a rock shelf, broke my leg, and spent the night in an abandoned mine. When the search party found me, Cecilia was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, blaming herself for failing to protect her sister.

She became the brave girl who had led the search.

I became the burden who put everyone at risk.

The most dangerous part had been the tonics she brought to my bed.

Whenever I was hurt, she sat beside me and fed me the bitter medicine one spoonful at a time. She claimed she wanted to make up for our old misunderstandings. I had wanted so badly to believe she still saw me as family.

Yet my dragonfire weakened after every dose.

The healers called it a birth defect. No one considered that the tonic might contain ash-thorn extract, a poison that slowly ate through the soul.

I hadn’t been sick since I was twelve.

I had been murdered by inches.

At the same time, in the council tower of Obsidian Keep, Cassian sat behind his desk and failed to read a single line of the border reports before him.

Pain kept traveling through the bond. At first, it was no more than a pinprick. Then it grew heavier, as if an invisible hand were slowly crushing his heart.

He swept the scrolls from his desk. “Damn it.”

He wanted to find me and see where I had gone. But every time he remembered the scene in the Oath Hall and the rash on Cecilia’s face, pride stopped him from being the first to bend.

In the end, he sent an order through the message crystal.

[Come back immediately and apologize to Cecilia. Leaving the Keep won’t erase what you did.]

I didn’t answer.

Not because I was holding out, but because my hands shook too badly to lift the crystal.

Once, I would have hoped the pain in our bond might finally make him realize I was dying. Now I no longer wanted scraps of concern that arrived only after I had begged for them.

The High Healer’s deadline ended tomorrow.

The following afternoon, someone knocked softly on my door.

A red-haired boy stood outside wearing the apprentice pin of the Copper Kettle tavern. He held a covered clay pot in both hands. “The mistress saw you pass last night and thought you looked ill. She sent stew and hot bread.”

The smell of herbs and roasted roots drifted through the lid.

My eyes burned.

On the final day of my life, the person offering me a warm meal was a stranger who didn’t even know my name.

I reached for the pot, but familiar footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor.

Cecilia approached in a dark blue cloak with a flawless smile. “There you are, Evelyn. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

She shoved the boy aside. The pot smashed against the floor, spilling broth over my skirt and legs. I stumbled back with a gasp.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Cecilia didn’t sound sorry at all. “But you really shouldn’t eat food from strangers. Who knows what a border tavern puts in its stew?”

The boy’s face flushed with anger. “Our mistress made that herself.”

Cecilia released the pressure of a highborn dragonkin. The boy went white and caught the wall to keep from falling to his knees.

“Go,” she ordered.

When he was gone, she shut the door and dropped the sweet smile.

“One more thing. The clerk who processed your renunciation has been dismissed. Cassian ordered it himself after learning that the man helped you dissolve the bond.”

“Now the entire Court knows you tried to punish the Dragon Lord and dragged an Oath officer down with you.”

My chest tightened.

The clerk had only followed the law. Because of me, he had lost his post.

“Why?” I whispered.

Cecilia’s smile twisted into something ugly.

“Because I hate you.”

She moved closer. “Why couldn’t you crawl somewhere far away and die? You’ve got one foot in the grave, yet you’re still hovering near the Court, making Cassian think about you.”

“Can’t you see it? He has never trusted you. To him, you’re nothing but an obligation fate dumped in his lap.”

I braced myself against the table and looked at her calmly.

“Cecilia, I have never deliberately hurt you.”

“I treated you like my sister, and I took the blame every time you set me up.”

“Why did you need to destroy me?”