Page 178 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

“This is everything.” Emmeline twirled her ring around her finger. “Every single thing Roremar and I have gathered.” She braced her palms on the table. “The answer is here. I just…don’t know what it is yet.”

“Is any of this new?” he asked.

She gestured to the information Regina had given her tonight. “Just this stuff about the Warders of Selene and who she might be, but I don’t know how that could connect to Roremar.” Desmond traded his ale for the papers, flicking through them as Emmeline went on, “Everything else, he’s seen. I’ve been with Myrella all day, so I didn’t get a chance to look at anything.”

“How is she?”

“Heartbroken,” Emmeline confessed. “She and Nico had…I don’t know what it was, but it was something special and innocent and promising. And suddenly, it was gone.”

“I can understand that. Losing someone in a blink.” He blew out a breath and dropped the Selene papers to the table. “It’s impossible to get over.”

“I know,” Emmeline whispered. She sank down into a chair, and Desmond took one opposite her. “How are you? Nico was your friend.”

“Pretty fucking awful. And if I feel this bad, I can’t imagine how Rore feels.”

She couldn’t either.

“What could Nico even have been doing in the cells?” Emmeline wondered aloud. “Or Roremar? We fell asleep upstairs last night. When I woke up, he was just gone.”

The tug in her chest that she’d followed beneath the Trade House echoed, the sensation hollow and bitter.

“I wish there was something I could do to comfort Myrella, too,” Emmeline said, fingers curling around the corner of her journal. “But grief like that doesn’t only need comfort. It doesn’t go away, no matter how many people are around you. It feeds and breathes its own life. It will take all of you if you allow it to.” Pain wrenched through her chest as she remembered saying goodbye to her mother for the last time. As the darkness that had eclipsed her transformed her over the years. “I worry how this will change her.”

Desmond ran his fingers through his hair, blond waves unbound and disheveled. “Grief changes all of us. Right now, we’re all undergoing it. Who knows who we’ll become at the end.”

“It will be changing Roremar, too,” Emmeline muttered, edges of the paper tearing beneath her fingers.

“I lost a friend today.” It was the rawest Desmond’s words had ever sounded. No bravado or taunting or animosity lacing a single one. “I don’t want to lose another.”

“We aren’t going to lose him,” she asserted, daring to reach across the table and squeeze his arm. “I won’t allow it. I’ll do…” She swallowed, even her magic pausing as if waiting for her vow. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

And she would. Bare any wound, uncoil any secret, offer up every last part of herself. If only it meant Roremar got to live.

Desmond picked up his charcoal, resuming his absentminded sketching, and it felt like a truce had been called between them.

“So Rore has seen all this,” Desmond said, nodding at the table without looking up. “Maybe he’s working on his own reasoning for his arrest right now.”

“Maybe.” Emmeline sighed, the heartbreak bleeding through her. “But I was there when he was arrested. He didn’t fight.”

The charcoal slipped from Desmond’s fingers. “He just…let them take him?”

She nodded grimly, the memory of him being dragged away, eyes on his lifeless brother, carving out a hole in her heart.

“Fuck,” Desmond cursed, fist dropping to the table. “There’s definitely more to it, then. Roremar can be impulsive when he’s not being so damn responsible, and if someone was trying to take him from his brother’s body…”

“I know.” Emmeline couldn’t help the bit of defeat deepening her words.

“Why don’t you try reading since my Fates did nothing?” Desmond suggested. “Maybe Anphrosia can help.”

Emmeline shrugged. “Sure.” Her magic had been beating a drum in her chest for so long, and she hadn’t been able to read all day. It needed the release. “Maybe she’ll be more forthcoming now.”

She’d purposely pushed off any communication with the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration since the incident with the Snake Charmer. Not that Anphrosia was to blame—Emmeline had known deep down that she’d needed to go there—but she was still recovering from the scars she’d opened that night.

Now, though, she didn’t give an Angel’s wings.

Digging through her satchel, she pulled out a rose oil tincture and splashed it across her wrists and neck, as if it were perfume.

Desmond slid matches and a small oil well across the table. “Do you need⁠—”