Page 173 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Brayan—Brayan, the man who had held me to such impossible standards that I signed my life away to the Orders just because I wanted to prove myself to him—had needed me. Strange how this realization so stunned me.

“I should have been there,” I said, quietly.

Even knowing all that I knew now, I meant it.

He shook his head. “It’s… it is what it is.”

I turned back to our task. I thought we were done. But after another few minutes, Brayan said, “They let me do it, you know.”

“What?”

“The Ryvenai extremists. The murderers. The military let me be the one to execute them.”

Fuck. I didn’t know that people had died for this—for my crime. I’d never asked, never wanted to know. I still wished I did not know.

“Did it make you feel better?” I asked.

“Yes.” A pause. “No.”

Sounded about right.

I was desperate to end this conversation, but Brayan kept talking. We were barely even pretending to hunt anymore. “It’s… strange. There’s something I can’t stop thinking about. They weren’t what I was expecting.”

“What?”

“The murderers. The ones who did it. They were just so… they were soweak. There were ten of them, but more than half were scrawny, drug-addicted teenagers. How did that happen? How did our father let that happen? He was one of the most effective warriors in Ara, and yet these—theseratsmanaged to kill them, with him in the house?”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

I knew the answer, of course. Remembered the way my father’s face had changed when he saw mine. How he’d been ready to fight but had paused just long enough to temper his shot, make it non-fatal. Even as he watched me do the most horrific things, he was not willing to kill his son.

I spent a lot of time thinking about our father, too. Thinking about that moment.

“I couldn’t get my head around it,” Brayan went on. “And I came to a conclusion. I think that they must have taken hostages. I think they probably would have gone after the girls first. Maybe Kira, maybe Shailia, but I think Marisca would have fought them and—”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw down my bow and whirled to him. “Stop. I don’t want to listen to this.”

A flicker of—fuck, was thathurt?—crossed Brayan’s face. His jaw tightened.

“You don’t want to know what happened?” he said. “You haven’t spent the last decade agonizing about that?”

Suddenly, I understood why Tisaanah and Sammerin viewed sending me away and never seeing me again as a mercy compared to the truth.

“You want it to make sense,” I said. “It’s never going to make sense.”

“It could make more sense than it does.”

“And what fucking good would that do? Why do you want to know how they suffered before they died? Is that how you want to remember them?”

“It is the only way I remember them now,” he said, between his teeth. “I remember them a million different ways in a million different seconds in the same two-hour span. I imagine them in the unknown of all of those questions. Did our mother have to watch them die?”

“Brayan, stop.”

“Did those pieces of shitrapeour sisters—”

Fuck, I absolutelycould not listento this. “STOP.”

“I can’t,” he ground out. “I can’t stop.This is what I’m telling you. I imagine them in infinite horrors.It never stops.You don’t feel that way?”

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