Page 191 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

“The one who invited me here?” Maeson followed up, voice low.

Roremar’s stare whipped between them. “She invited you?”

He looked to his uncle, his nod a confirmation. What in a Fatesdamned ruthless grave was going on here?

“It is lovely to meet you both,” Emmeline addressed Enya and Maeson, and Roremar almost had to laugh. Ever the proper tutor when she wanted to be. “While I’d enjoy getting to speak with you at length about your respective isles and the work done there, that is not the reason I asked you here today.”

“Please, go on.” Enya smiled pleasantly, clearly a fan of Emmeline’s. Of course, she was. How could she not be?

Emmeline stepped further into the room, Desmond closing the doors behind them. Roremar wanted to beg, to fall to his knees and plead. She couldn’t do this—it would ruin her, too, and he’d been trying so damn hard to avoid that cruel fate.

“Roremar Silventa is not responsible for these murders,” she declared.

No. No. No.

Nico’s life, his father’s, the others he had taken. They all hammered at his mind.

“I am!” he shouted. “My hands killed all those women. I killed my brother, and I—” His words caught in his throat, a secret he’d kept for so long, releasing it now felt sacrilegious, but he forced it out if only to convince them all. “I killed my father, too.”

“By the fucking Fates,” Desmond said, blowing out a whistle. Emmeline’s jaw dropped, too. Apparently they hadn’t worked out that bloody piece of his past. That he had not found his father dead that morning ten years ago, but he’d been the one who drove the blade.

Roremar’s eyes flashed to Aldryn, but his uncle only nodded grimly, as if he’d always known. Of course he had.

From his chair, the Snake Charmer grinned as the madness unfolded.

“Your hands may have taken the lives, but it was not you, Roremar,” Emmeline went on calmly.

“It was me. I swear it.” His words were drowned out by questions, one on top of the next.

“What is she talking about?” Tarli Richmond asked. He had known Deacon Silventa, worked with him a few times. His pale face paled even further as he looked from Aldryn to Emmeline.

Maeson blurted out, “Who are you?”

“How is that possible?” Brean Witz asked, voice low.

“It’s not,” Roremar affirmed, refusing to let panic seep into his voice. “It was me.”

He needed them to believe him. Desperation scratched at his throat. His nails dug into the bruises Nico had left on his body. The ones he hadn’t allowed to heal over the past week.

“It was me⁠—”

“Stop lying, Roremar!” Emmeline begged, her expression broken with hurt.

“I’m not!”

Desmond’s voice was low. “Rore.” He met his best friend’s gaze. “Come on.”

“It was me.”

Emmeline’s teeth sank into her bottom lip as her stare pleaded, the agony in that Fatesdamned motion slicing through him.

“If Roremar is not responsible”—Enya interrupted the ongoing calamity with a strike of calm command—“then who is?”

An apology deepened Emmeline’s hazel eyes as she took a deep breath. Without looking away from him, she said, “It was Dryvius. The Fate of Chaos and Revelry.”

Chapter Sixty-Four

Roremar