Page 159 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“Just another minute. Please, just one more minute.”

“What did you mean?” I asked, unsure if I even wanted to know.

“I’ve told you, little bird. You’ve never needed me. Not really.”

“But…but…you’ve—” I’d felt it. That first day we met, on the castle terrace when he held me. Then outside the tavern when he’d touched my hair. And many more times I’d asked him to do it. I’d felt it. I’d felt him doing it. I’d no longer felt anguish, or terror, or hurt.

“Never. I’ve never touched any of it. Never taken any of it away. Only pretended to. It somehow worked.”

I bitterly laughed, shaking. “It can’t be. I’ve felt it.”

“Whatever it was, it was not magic.”

What?

No.

He’d lied to me?

He’d lied to me all this time?

I pushed at his chest, the air not seeming enough for my desperate lungs. “Let me go.”

“One more moment. Just one more.”

I pushed harder, and harder, my nails digging on his skin, scratching and making him bleed. I kicked and writhed, but he didn’t let me go. “Why?” I panted, breathless. “Why did you lie to me? All this time, all this time you made me think that it made me better. That I needed it to make me better! You made me dependent on it! You made me feel like I wanted to die when you denied me it!”

“Forgive me.”

He held all my secrets and I had thought I had held all of his. How…how had we told one another so, so many things, so many unsaid words and dark secrets, yet…yet we’d never confessed the simplest things? “Let me go, Malik. Let me go!” I screamed, wind blasting around us while the grounds grew thick with ice. “Why would you do this to me? Why?”

“Nothing I will tell you will justify it.”

“I don’t need you to justify anything, I need you to tell me the truth.”

“You would leave me.”

“You left me first!”

The moment his hold on me came loose, I crawled back, putting distance between us. Then I cried, like a fool, I cried. Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. Truth was…truth was—what was the damn truth?

That it didn’t matter, but that is actually should?

That whatever he’d done had been cure enough?

But maybe the truth was that he’d clung to me like every other poison he’d clung to. He’d clung to me because of some high it gave him. He didn’t want me. He might have never wanted me. He’d gotten better and I was the last thing that stood between the old him and the new him. I was the last thing he depended on, the last thing he needed to move past so he could fully heal. Maybe he’d come back because of that. Because he couldn’t clear me out of his system like he’d cleared everything else. I was his new poison.

Wiping a hand over my face, I steeled my spine to stand straight. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Every day.”

“But you chose today.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because last night I figured I can finally live without you talking to me forever. It doesn’t matter if you never will, it won’t change a damn thing.”