Page 170 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

“Roremar,” she whispered.

The incense in the air was dizzying, slowing her brain from piecing it together. Or perhaps that was her own denial.

But she couldn’t stop it when Roremar’s devastation morphed into disgust that tugged at her heart. Not as the instinct to drive a blade into her own chest deepened.

She willed him to shake his head, to see the questions forming in her eyes and provide some sort of explanation.

But he only looked at her. And nodded.

Soldiers in the navy regalia of Lyra Isle Guard stormed into the cell as Emmeline fell to her knees. They shouted, but she couldn’t make sense of their words.

She was seven years old again, listening to her sister’s screams as she was taken from their home. She was nine, saying goodbye to her father for the last time. She was eleven, hidden beneath a rickety bed as what was left of her world turned to ruins.

She was losing everything again.

Through tunneling vision, she watched as they pulled Nico from his brother’s arms. Watched as they secured heavy iron cuffs around the wrists of the man she thought she knew.

Watched as once again, the person she’d let in was ripped away.

The tugging thread in her chest went wild.

Why wasn’t he fighting back?

Why wasn’t he standing up for himself?

Why wasn’t he telling them the truth of whatever had happened here?

The blood on his cheeks.

The ash on his hands.

There was no way.

Emmeline squeezed her eyes tight, willing the stinging to stop, but budding tears rolled down her cheeks.

Roremar wasn’t fighting the guards. The thread in her chest went deathly still, giving in to despair. She leaned forward on her palms, hand landing on a small metal circle. One of Roremar’s rings. It must have fallen off.

Absent-mindedly, as they took him away and one of the guards tried to speak with her about what she found, Emmeline slipped it into her pocket. She wasn’t sure why, but she was so confused, and though betrayal and denial were still warping through her, she wanted that small band of metal.

Roremar’s footsteps dragged down the corridor as if he was barely able to stand, and it was his lack of resistance that forced the senseless thought to surface.

Roremar Silventa was the murderer they’d been trying to find this entire time.

And he’d just killed his own brother.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Emmeline

“How could he have done this, Emmeline?” Myrella sobbed into her shoulder later that evening. The day had been a whirlwind of interrogations and tears.

After the guards took Roremar away, they’d walked her to an empty chamber in the Trade House. Given her a glass of water to calm her nerves and offered her incense or oils, which she promptly rejected.

She hadn’t realized how much blood had stained her until they emerged from the cells. With the bright mystlights and polished marble of the room they’d stuck her in, the crimson swiping the pale lilac of her dress and her bare hands was striking.

She’d needed to scrub her skin, her heart, get all that taint off.

She’d stuttered through every question from Darcy with the Lyra Isle Guard, unable to string logical sentences together because nothing about this made sense. Roremar had lied to her—to all of them—and killed not only multiple innocent women but his brother, as well. His brother who didn’t even have the correct Fate tie.