Deception

  My pulse is a deafening hammer pounding at my head. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Nineteen years ago, the Commander took his annual trip to Rowansmark. I wasn’t head groom yet, so I stayed behind. But that year, my job changed.” Jeremiah looks in my eyes. “That year, the Commander returned home, accused the few who’d accompanied him on the trip of treason, and executed them immediately. That’s how I became head groom.”

  “It’s not like executing people without cause is something the Commander never did. It doesn’t mean he was trying to cover up a kidnapping,” I say, because someone has to reach for logic and reason. “My mother—”

  “Your mother had recently lost her husband and hadn’t been assigned a new Protector yet. She’d been grieving inside her home for several months, unseen by all but the older neighbor who checked on her sometimes and brought her food. When she reappeared, she had you. Everyone assumed she’d been in confinement due to pregnancy. But I don’t know, Logan.” Jeremiah’s eyes lock on mine. “I never had cause to think about it before now, but you do look a lot like Julia McEntire. She used to make it a point to visit the Baalboden staff when the Commander visited Rowansmark. At least she did for a few years. I never knew why she bothered, but maybe she was looking for you. You’re the right age, the right name . . . plus the Commander always treated you like you didn’t belong in his city. Darius is right. That’s too big of a coincidence.”

  Something hot and vicious scrapes my thoughts, begging me to call him a liar. Demanding that I make him stop. That I keep the few precious memories I have of my mother—the only mother I ever knew—sacred. Untouched by this . . . travesty.

  This truth.

  The Commander’s last words, hurled at me as he took the fake Rowansmark technology from my hands and sentenced me to death, ring with unforgiving clarity in my memory. “You’ve outlived your usefulness to me. To all of Baalboden. It’s been nineteen years of waiting for my investment to pay off, and I can’t wait to rid my city of the stench of you.”

  No wonder I was ostracized for a crime I didn’t commit. Treated like a pariah. Like I alone was unworthy of Baalboden’s protection. To the Commander, I was nothing but an investment. An interloper he couldn’t wait to be rid of.

  “Why?” The word falls into the space between us, fraught with betrayal.

  The sympathy on Jeremiah’s face is like salt on a wound. My mother, with her infectious laughter and her single-minded dedication to keeping me safe, even if it meant risking her life. My mother, whose necklace I’d passed on to Rachel as a symbol that she was now my family.

  My mother, the liar. The grand pretender building a life with a child she had no right to call her own.

  “Why let me keep my real name?” I have to push the words past my lips.

  Jeremiah shrugs. “Your mother’s surname was Billings, but she told everyone McEntire was your middle name, and that’s all we ever heard you called. I guess after she died, and you spent years as an outcast, none of us remembered to attach Billings to the end of your name anymore.”

  “And why did being Logan McEntire of Rowansmark make me worth kidnapping?”

  Darius says, “Marcus is a senior member of Rowansmark’s military council and heads the Division for Technological Advancement. He’s a brilliant scientist. Second to none.”

  “Logan is brilliant, too,” Jeremiah says quickly.

  I turn away. I don’t want to hear myself compared to this man I feel nothing for.

  “Nineteen years ago, Marcus was working on an invention that would call and control the creature you call the Cursed One. Once completed, the invention would give James Rowan unbridled power, something the Commander could never allow,” Darius says.

  I grab a quill from the table. Crushing it in my hand, I let its sharp edge press against my skin as something in me, some final piece that survived the heartbreak of my mother’s death, the terrible loss of Oliver and Jared, and the horror of watching Baalboden burn, shatters.

  “Marcus was a loyal man living in a city-state that values patriotism and self-sacrifice above all else,” Darius says. “Bribery wouldn’t work. Threats against his life wouldn’t either. He’d fall on his sword in the grand Rowansmark tradition before dishonoring his leader by giving the technology to Baalboden.”

  “So the Commander found his weakness.” My voice is a liar steadfastly refusing to reveal the wreckage beneath my skin. I’m not my mother’s son. Not my father’s either. Not really. I’m the ultimate pawn in a game that started long before I was born.

  “We all figured the Commander struck a deal—your life in exchange for the completed invention. It’s not like Marcus could go to James Rowan for help. In Rowansmark, loyalty and patriotism to the city-state come before individual lives. James Rowan wouldn’t have attacked Baalboden to rescue you, and he would’ve immediately removed Marcus from the Division of Technological Advancement, thereby ensuring Marcus could never betray his city by trading technology for you—”

  “He had to agree.” I know what it’s like to have my back against the wall because the Commander holds all the cards. A single, tenuous thread of connection unravels out of the tapestry of lies I was fed as a boy and stretches toward the man who spent nineteen years working on an invention meant to ransom my life.

  “No wonder our people are being murdered in some twisted example of Rowansmark pain atonement,” Jeremiah says, and I silently curse him as Darius’s eyes grow large. That’s not a piece of information I wanted Lankenshire to have. “Remember that huge bounty Rowansmark put on Jared Adams because they thought he stole something from them?”

  “Kind of hard to forget something like that when I’m in love with his daughter.” I draw myself up and stand straight and tall, like finding out my entire life was a lie means nothing to me.

  “I assume Marcus gave the device to Jared thinking the Commander would then let you return home. But obviously James Rowan learned that the device was missing. That would be a stain on Marcus’s honor. He could only remove the stain by returning the device and then surviving his pain atonement.”

  “You’re suggesting that my”—I can’t bring myself to call him my father—“that Marcus is the one who slit our guards’ throats, started the fires, and poisoned our people. . . .” I shake my head. “Why? Why work so hard to save me only to turn around and try to destroy me? It makes no sense.”

  “Maybe to him it does,” Darius says. The avid interest in his voice turns my stomach. This might be an interesting family drama to him, but this is my life lying in pieces all around me.

  Jeremiah speaks slowly, as if feeling his way carefully through each thought. “He must have dedicated himself to ransoming you, his son. Nine years after the Commander took you, we heard that your mother had committed suicide. He must have dreamed of a life with you. Introducing you to Rowansmark society. Telling others the glorious tale of how he defeated the Commander at his own game and rescued his son at the same time. I’m sure he was tracking the device. It’s what you would do, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  “But then Jared didn’t deliver the package. And someone in the Department for Technological Advancement realized the device was missing. Marcus must have thought all was lost. Rowansmark would recover the package and the Commander would make good on his threat and kill you for Marcus’s failure.”

  “Only Rachel and I got to the device first,” I say, and my heart thuds heavily against my rib cage as I realize the truth. Somewhere along the journey back to Baalboden, my father must’ve caught up to us and watched us from the shadows. The knowledge is a violation—a forcible unveiling of moments I thought were mine alone.

  “And the first thing you did with the invention was bring it back to the Commander.” Jeremiah’s voice holds no condemnation, but I flinch anyway.

  “We never planned to give it to him! We built a fake. We wanted to destroy the Commander’s hold on Baalboden.”

  “But from the outside, it must’ve l
ooked like you’d been raised to be the Commander’s son instead of Marcus’s. And a Rowansmark man wouldn’t question signs of absolute loyalty and patriotism.”

  I stare at Jeremiah as sick horror crawls up the back of my throat. “And you think my father is the kind of man who would use that assumption as an excuse to murder innocent people?”

  “No, and I don’t think it’s your father who’s doing it. Not directly. I’d recognize him if I saw him, and he isn’t here.”

  “So all we really know is that someone from Baalboden is helping someone from Rowansmark deliver a sentence of pain atonement against me. Which is exactly what we knew before I walked into the room. We’re back at the beginning,” I say. Without any additional information, everything we’re discussing is speculation anyway. I need facts. Plausible theories. I need to look every single Baalboden survivor in the eye and search for a flicker of secret knowledge that shouldn’t be there.

  And I need to find a way to accept the fact that the heartbreaking loss and destruction we’ve suffered over the last six weeks is truly because of who I am and what I’ve done. I don’t know how to wrap my mind around that without it crushing me, but I must.

  But first, I need Rachel. With the foundation I’ve always depended on suddenly cracking beneath my feet, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than by her side. She might not be able to make any more sense of this than I can, but her blunt honesty and absolute love for me will go a long way toward leading me to solid ground again.

  “I need those maps,” I say. “Tonight.”

  Turning on my heel, I leave the room before either of them can say a word.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  RACHEL

  I press the fingernails of my left hand against my right forearm. Thin white crescents on blackened crimson. Somewhere beneath this wound—beneath my skin—redemption flows. I just have to dig deep enough to find it.

  My hands shake. My fingertips are colorless and cold.

  Guilty.

  Alone.

  Broken.

  I strain to feel it. The weight of my crimes. My heartbreak. I want to reverse my choice—take back the part of me that made me human—but I’ve pushed the grief so far away from me, I no longer know how to find it. All that’s left inside of me is silence, dense and absolute. A poison that promised peace but delivered hell. It fills all my secret spaces and pushes at my skin until something, somewhere, has to give.

  Gripping the wound with shaking fingers, I slowly slide my nails against the jagged seam of broken flesh. A thin line of crimson wells up. The pain hits a second later, sharp and stinging, and I’m grateful.

  Finally.

  Something real. A tiny piece of the hurt I should be feeling. A small slice of the punishment I know I deserve.

  The blood beads together, swells, and plummets down my arm and off my fingertips in shining red drops.

  A harsh sob tears through me, choking me with its ferocity, and I slash another line of crimson into the wound.

  The pain crawls up my arm, and my tears slide off my face to mingle with my blood on the soft white blanket covering me.

  I can feel this. Why can I stand to feel this—this small, petty thing—but I can’t stand to feel the loss of Dad and Oliver? The horror of killing Melkin? The still-gaping wound of Sylph’s death?

  I scratch at my arm, and pain is a fire-breathing monster underneath my skin, but it isn’t enough. Not even close. The hurt is too small. The blood offered isn’t nearly what I owe.

  The killer was wrong. Pain hasn’t made me feel alive. It’s proven that nothing I do will ever be enough to unbreak all the shattered pieces of the girl I once thought I’d be. I bleed and bleed, but still the blood of those I’ve lost is stronger.

  And already the first scratch is congealing. Hardening.

  Healing.

  How dare my arm heal when I can’t? I scratch at it again, opening it wider. Digging deeper. The sobs racking my chest are heaving, desperate things tangled up with words—meaningless half sounds that flay the air but fail to give voice to the awful, consuming silence that refuses to let me go.

  “Oh, Rachel.” Quinn climbs out of his bed on unsteady legs, moves to my side, and swiftly wraps his arms around me.

  I reach for my wounded arm again.

  “Stop.” Quinn’s voice is firm. “Rachel, stop.”

  But I can’t stop. If I do, the hurt will subside. The skin will knit itself back together. And I’ll be a prisoner to the silence again.

  Quinn’s fingers grip my left elbow and squeeze. There’s a sharp pain as a nerve is pinched, and then a buzzing, like a swarm of mosquitos trapped beneath my skin, races down my arm.

  My suddenly numb fingers fall to the bloody blanket. Useless.

  I turn on him, my right fist covered in blood, and punch his chest, his stomach, anything I can reach. My blows are weak; the burned muscle refuses to lend me any strength. He absorbs it without complaint while I pant and sob and push words at him as if by hurting him I will somehow feel better.

  “Let go. Let. Me. Go.” I choke on my tears, and try to twist away from him.

  “If you stop hurting yourself.”

  “I can’t. Don’t you see that? It’s all I have left.” My chest aches as I gulp down air only to have it tear its way to freedom in a wail of anguish.

  “No, it isn’t.” His voice is quiet as he reaches past me to grab a tin of salve. “You have Logan. Us. And most importantly, you have yourself.”

  I sob quietly as he smears the clear aloe over my wound. It turns pink where it mixes with my blood. The pain throbs, but the sharp spikes are already fading.

  Soon, I’ll be left with nothing but silence again.

  “I don’t have myself,” I whisper, too desperate to let shame seal the words inside of me. “Not anymore. I’m lost. I’m broken, and I can’t fix it.”

  He remains quiet while he carefully bandages my arm, and I realize his fingers are shaking, his breathing is harsh, and he looks pale. He inhaled too much smoke saving my life to be out of bed fighting to save it again.

  “You may have lost your way, but you”—he points to my heart—“aren’t lost. You’re still in there. And you have everything you need to heal. You just have to find the courage to do it.”

  “Sit down, Quinn, before you fall down.”

  I pull my knees up to my chest, and he eases himself onto the middle of my cot and sits cross-legged, facing me.

  “I don’t like to tell my story,” he says. The words are full of pain. The kind of pain I know runs deep beneath my silence. “But I think you need to hear it. Will you listen?”

  He waits for my answer, his dark eyes watching me with a strange mix of dread and compassion. I nod.

  Leaning his forearms on his knees, he splays his large hands over the white blanket, careful to avoid the blood I left behind. “My village is different from other Tree Villages. When we were formed in the aftermath of the Cursed Ones, the founders had to decide on a system of government. They chose to assign duties to each family based on that family’s skill set. So someone who was good at baking would then become the baker, and someone who was good at farming would be in charge of growing the wheat. Make sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever job your family was assigned, that was your family’s job for the duration of your life in the village. If you were a schoolteacher, then you trained your children to be schoolteachers. If you were a leader, then you trained your children to be leaders. No one was allowed to switch jobs. Our leaders decided this would help our society run without conflict. From birth, every child knew his place and had no aspirations for anything different. And only those specifically trained to be experts in a field would be doing that job.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  He looks at his hands as though he can see something I can’t. “Our family was in charge of protecting the village from outside threats.”

  “That makes sense, too.”
r />   His hair slides along his cheek as he raises his face to look at me. “Why?”

  “Because you and Willow are scary good at fighting, weapons, and basic survival.”

  He laughs, but it sounds like it hurts him. “Scary good. Yes, we are that. My father was a boy when the previous civilization was destroyed. He was only fifteen when he joined the village. He couldn’t farm, couldn’t build, and couldn’t fix things. He was good at only one thing: killing people.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. Quinn’s long fingers clench handfuls of blanket.

  “He taught us only to be good at killing people, Rachel. That’s all we knew. We hunted humans like you hunt animals. Learned their weaknesses and how to exploit them. How to extract every possible ounce of pain if we needed information from them.”

  He falls silent, and the cords on his neck stand out. I reach across the blanket and cover his hands with mine. “You can’t help who gave birth to you. You can’t blame yourself for what he taught you, or what he expected from you.”

  He looks at me. “No, I can’t. And I don’t. But that doesn’t make the memories easier to face. Every time I killed, it took another piece of me until I was afraid I’d have nothing left. I didn’t take joy or pride in it like he did. And he saw that in me. He called it cowardice.”

  My lip curls. “He’s a fool. I call it courage.”

  He turns his hands over and laces his fingers through mine. “Your father called it courage, too. I’d started to stand up to my father. Started killing people quickly even when he wanted them tortured. Started refusing to search for highwaymen or trackers to kill unless they were actually threatening the village.”

  “And he punished you?”

  “He punished Willow. He gave her the duties he’d formerly given to me. He expected her to stalk and hunt and torture and glory in it. And she . . .”

  “She did,” I say, because I can see it’s true. Willow wouldn’t back down, especially if she thought that by doing what was expected of her she could somehow save her brother pain.