Page 171 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Unless I took their life, no.”

“Ah, so the blood on your hands is a little thicker.”

Her fingers clenched as if they would drip with Finnian’s silver blood just to show him the truth.

“Why are you telling me this?” Kyleer asked, bored.

Zaiana resisted the impulse to hurt him and then leave him to bleed out. “For you to drop that insufferable wounded look you have as if you expectbetterof me.”

Kyleer laughed bitterly. “I’m not wounded, Zai. It’s going to take a lot more than luring me to you only to stab me in the back.Believe it or not, I’ve been through it before. You’re still not that special.”

She could credit him for his resilience, yet all it did was emit a sharpness in her chest that threatened to cut.

She would not bleed for him.

Kyleer said, “Go on then—tell me how you did it. It’s rather tedious in here day by day, so I could use a good horror story featuring my favorite beautiful nightmare.”

He riled her like no one else ever had. Not even Maverick. This was a different kind of irritation that wasn’t about winning but figuring him out, maybe evenprotectinghim.

Zaiana paced in front of his cell. “The Blood Trials had three stages. The first was a game. We were set at the foot of a mountain and had one week to reach the top. Many were eliminated, being killed by their competitors. I didn’t spill a drop of blood to get to the top first. The second trial, we faced each other in combat. The winners would go on to compete against each other until there were only three. The final trial, we were told we would face our greatest enemy.”

Kyleer had fixed his attention her without any taunt or teasing. It made her skin crawl worse than when he was getting on her nerves.

“You faced your lover,” Kyleer concluded.

Zaiana glanced at her hip, at the strip of Finnian’s shirt tied there on the hilt of her sword, and the memory rammed into her. “Love is always a delusion. This ideal that a single person would truly put you above anything and everything. There will always be a temptation that overpowers it.”

“What was his?”

Kyleer voiced her eternal torment. She would never know. Heartache consumed her so wholly that when he’d attacked without mercy or hesitation, she’d had no choice but to fightback. Then rage embraced her for the betrayal as he tried to cut her down and shehadto end him.

“Power. Status. Do one person’s reasons really matter?”

“Was he in the running for Delegate?”

“No. He claimed he didn’t want that. But perhaps that was the exchange for killing me.”

Kyleer’s frown deepened. “Why would they grant one person the chance to win without needing to complete the other trials?”

“You don’t know their ways,” she snapped. “They don’t need reason to bend the rules. No one needs logic to do as they damned well please, and they’re always starving for cruel entertainment at our expense.”

Kyleer groaned against the ache of his wound and shackles as he straightened. “All I’m saying is, even the wicked have a motive. Surely you’ve found out what that had to be for him to betray you like that. It’s a rather extreme way of trying to win a—no offense—hollow title, when he could have just competed himself.”

She did take offense to the gibe at her title. It infuriated her, because she knew it to be true now. Her whole life she’d trained for it, thinking it would prove something, but it didn’t matter; she would always remain the masters’ foot soldier.

“Zai,” he said. The jarring softness snapped her sight to him from her tunneling thoughts. He’d come close, right to the bars, and his moss-green eyes were searching. “Have you ever considered his will wasn’t his own?”

“What?” she snapped. It was a ridiculous notion. She had been there. Felt the ferocity of his attacks. Listened to the taunts he’d goaded her with.

I never loved you.

It was all a trick.

You are weak.

Zaiana shook her head, having nothing but anger to torch those taunts she’d buried with his corpse.

---