Page 173 of The Stars are Dying

“What are you doing to him?” I snapped my head back to Nyte, who stood watching us carefully.

“Nothing,” he said coldly.

“You’re tricking him!”

Dark ire flexed around his eyes at the accusation. Shadows began to swirl around him like he would use them to strike or leap the distance to get to me. I left my thoughts wide and free, and something he heard eased back those primed arms of smoke.

“Do you truly believe I would be capable of hurting you?”

I said nothing, still seething at the fact he’d manipulated Zathrian to stop our escape.

Nyte growled low, and I thought to brace against him as he lashed out, but it wasn’t at me or Zath. He spun instead to the next commotion to enter the room.

My alarm rose this time. My protest and fight returned for this.

“Let him go,” I said.

Zath hooked my arm against my near step.

I turned to him with pleading eyes. “You have to snap out of his control. We can’t let him kill Calix.”

“I’m not under his control.”

Zath sounded so convincing, so normal, that my mind wanted to collapse me again. But it couldn’t be true. The Zathrian I knew wouldn’t be content to remain here with such an unhinged adversary loose. He wouldn’t betray me.

“Even after all your cowardly treatment of her, she still pleads with me to spare you,” Nyte said.

I whirled then, yanking my arm free from Zath to watch as he circled Calix, who was on his knees. Calix didn’t look at me. I didn’t expect him to, nor did I need his warmth.

“He came to help me,” I said. “You have to have known that.”

Nyte spared me a look. “Do you forget so easily he would have let that pitiful man’s dogs take you before you even made it out of the main city in Alisus?” He stalked to me, and I held up my chin in defiance. “If it hadn’t been for Zathrian, who followed you to make sure you made it out safe, he would have let them take you.”

My breath caught. Why hadn’t Zath mentioned it was his arrows that had killed those men?

“I won’t deny, even the words he spoke to you before and after have made me itch for his throat for some time. Then he gave me far more just cause when he led a threat on your life.”

“He was protecting Cassia,” I protested.

Nyte stopped before me. “That I could understand. Truly. But will you still want to protect him when you know the truth of the attack that claimed your friend’s life?”

Calix spoke, a quiet declaration of defeat. “It was supposed to be you.”

I blinked at him as everything began to cancel itself out around me. Everything but my focus on him. It didn’t hurt to hear what I had wished for too—that it should’ve been me instead. But that wasn’t what Calix meant, and my mind began to scream with a desire to hide from the truth that was about to bring the world down around me.

“What do you mean?” I dared to ask.

“Foolish human,” Nyte said to him. “So much magick in the world you believe anything is possible and never stop to realize it comes at a price. Fate is such a fickle thing.” Nyte paced around Calix, and it was the longest I’d seen him stave off his clear desire to kill. “You see, there can be many courses to one’s fate. A soldier wounded in battle may die there, or they may switch paths to live and come to the crossroads of many more if a healer gets to them on time. Choice and timing have great influence. Cassia Vernhalla had no other path. No more choices. No crossing of time with someone else who could save her. Her fate was to leave by her illness, and the extra years she got were only stretching the limits of mercy on that.”

Nyte knew about Cassia. Far more in depth than he should. Everything I thought I knew was drifting away from me piece by piece, deserting me to a void of nothing.

His golden gaze came around, still pinning Calix with dark resentment. “There would have been a way to save her. I’m sure whatever they offered you to set up Astraea was not false. But it would have been at the cost of another life, and no, you would not have gotten to act her hero and take her place. It would have been someone innocent. Someone who would have otherwise lived a long and healthy life, because dark magick does not play fair. You might have still been willing if you knew…but I doubt she would have ever forgiven you.”

“That’s not true.” The denial that left my lips burned on my tongue. Because I believed it. In the way Calix merely bowed; didn’t try to deny or even apologize.

My heart was obliterated.

“Why?” I broke. So much rushed to the surface, and I was drowning. “What did I do to make you hate me so much!”

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