Page 251 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

This could change everything.

“However, I have two conditions,” he interrupted my thoughts.

Wariness crept in with the small bit of optimism I’d allowed to slip in, but I waited to hear him out.

“I want you to spare Inessa,” he said first.

That was easy enough. She had saved our lives, something Rowan had speculated was in repayment for when Rowan had once saved hers. If she was satisfying a life debt, we couldn’t expect more of her help, but I wouldn’t have needlessly executed a woman who had shown my wife kindness in any event.

“Of course,” Rowan responded earnestly, in time with my nod. “You have to know we would never intentionally hurt her when she’s been innocent in all of this.”

Korhonan nodded once, unsurprised but still cautious. Which meant his second condition was the one he was concerned about.

He turned his resolute hazel gaze on me, and I had the sinking feeling I knew what he was going to say before he even asked.

“And I want you to spare my brother.”

Of course he did. I tried to dispassionately consider the implications of keeping thesvolochalive after everything he had done, weighing them against Korhonan’s offer to help us remove him from power.

But when I blinked, I saw Ava standing over me with a whip. I saw contorted bodies and my wife’s dagger protruding from my father’s chest and a rivulet of blood running from the slice on her neck—all because of Iiro’s schemes.

My courtyard had been soaked in blood. Good men were slaughtered. Then there were my wife’s tears, soaking the bed from the destruction his threats had wrought. I might have lefther in that inn, but none of it would have been necessary if it weren’t for his storms-blasted vendetta against her.

I inhaled slowly, counting as I let the breath out.

Yes, I wanted him dead. Slowly, after he had lost everything.

But more than that, didn’t I want him defeated, along with the danger he posed to my lemmikki?

For a man as proud as Iiro, failure at my hands—at the hands of my wife—would be a fate worse than death.

Korhonan had only requested his life, not his freedom. And locking Iiro in a cage did satisfy a small amount of my bloodlust. It wasn’t enough, but it was preferable to the alternative of letting him keep a position of power from which he could threaten my people and my wife in the future.

Rowan did not share my sentiments, if her dropped jaw was anything to go by.

“You want us to spare Iiro after all of the people who died because of him?” She demanded, gripping her glass a little tighter as fury emanated from her tiny form in waves.

Korhonan sighed, sharply glancing from me back to her. “I’m quite certain there is no one in this room who doesn’t have blood on their hands.”

Rowan tilted her chin, guilt flushing her cheeks.

“Perhaps not,” she allowed. “But there is also no one in this room who has started a war lately.”

“Though I seem to recall your actions coming perilously close,” he replied, unwilling to back down.

“Because of a situation the brother you so desperately want to live put us in,” Rowan fired back, her temper mounting with each word.

I placed a hand on hers before she went for her dagger. As much as I wanted to take her side, the practical implications of Korhonan’s help were too tempting to pass up.

And there was a small part of me that saw his point. Rowan might not be swimming in the blood of innocents, but the same could not be said of me. Iiro was a despicable person, one whose level I would not stoop to on my worst day.

But, intentionally or otherwise, we had all played a hand in this war. What mattered now was ending it.

“You’re suggesting imprisonment of some sort?” I clarified, and he nodded.

“At Elk Estate.”

Rowan scoffed. “Where he can regroup and do this all over again in a couple of years?”

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