Page 38 of Cinder
The prince’s gaze flashed back toward Cin, and while his expression was shadowed in the darkness, Cin could see the drop and fall of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “With hisfists! I can take a few punches. There were two of us, and one of him, and we have the horse.”
It sounded so logical the way he said it, so unambiguous, but Cin could still feel every emotion of that moment as though it were happening over and over again inside him: fear, anger, hatred, and the pain—the pain that would keep coming, whenever the man chose it, like it surely had so many times before, until someone else stopped him.
The pain of watching Prince Lorenz be the one who hurt for it.
Something hot and tight tore through Cin’s chest, so much like anger and yet when it burst forth, it brought with it a blubber and a choked, “I’m sorry.”
His knees felt useless suddenly, the binding around his chest so tight that he couldn’t breathe. Hadn’tbeenbreathing. More than just his sides hurt, as though his ribs were curling inward, cutting him up from the inside. Then, he was sinking.
Prince Lorenz didn’t catch him. That hurt more than the ground, more than the endless ache beneath his bindings or the bite of his small knife into his own skin as he held it too tight.
“I’m sorry,” Cin cried, softly, so very softly for how large the scream inside him felt, for how desperately his soul seemed to want to tear off the mortal folds of his own skin and explode into a thousand unseen pieces, everywhere and nowhere all at once. “He’d been hurting someone. He was hurting you.” Just like the others. So much violence. So much pain. “I couldn’t let him.” Cin stared at his darkly coated hands, at his knife, as capable of as much death as any larger, stronger weapon, and said what he knew, “I just couldn’t let him.”
He wasn’t even sure the prince was still there—couldn’t bring himself to check—until, so softly, an unbloodied hand wrapped around his, then another. Prince Lorenz uncurled Cin’s fingers from the blade, taking it away. He tucked it into his belt. “You do care, after all,” he whispered. “That’s good.”
As the prince crouched there in front of Cin, he seemed to take more of Cin in, a dawning creeping over him. “If you’ve killed others like this... like him...” Prince Lorenz swallowed, and it felt as though he was eating Cin’s heart with each word, tearing into it with his teeth to find the feathers beneath. “You’ve killed...” He swallowed again. “How many? How many,Cinder-Ella.”
It echoed in Cin’s ears like a very different word.
Menace.
“Only the times there’s been a body.” Cin had heard Prince Lorenz claim with his own lips that he didn’t believe the Plumed Menace was guilty for his brother’s disappearance, but he still prayed to the God he’d so defiled that the prince saw the truth in him. “I swear on my life, on everything, that I had nothing to do with your brother’s disappearance or the feathers on his crown, none of it. If I knew what happened to him—” Cin choked back a sob, and it seemed the only sound he could make for a moment. When he continued, his voice was brittle and terrible. “IwishI knew that. If I did, I’d give you that peace—I’d give you anything.”
Prince Lorenz’s fingers fastened around Cin’s shirt, grabbing his cloak and collar with one hand, his other digging into his own chest the way he always did when he spoke of Adalwin. It was nothing like the times he’d grabbed Cin in the past: no protection, only purpose. “You swear it? You swear it wasn’t the Plumed Menace who killed him?”
“I swear,” Cin sobbed, the emotion unleashing inside him, so furious it seemed his soul was trying to force its way free of his body. If only he could rip off his skin and escape the awful purpose he’d chosen, or been chosen for—Cin didn’t know the difference anymore. “I would never have touched him. Every time, I’ve known my victims were terrible beforehand, known they bring only pain to the people closest them, and still I regretwhat I do. If there was another way...” Between his tears, he managed to lift his face towards the prince’s, and Cin couldn’t see him through the blur of his world, but he hoped—prayed—that Prince Lorenz could, at least, see him. “I don’t ever want to kill them. I don’t want to bethis, thismenace.”
The last word barreled out of him in a hiss, and the sharp edges of it seemed to tear through him. He cried all the harder.
Prince Lorenz crouched there, not a movement, not a sound. But Cin could feel that tension still in him, the war between his desire to help the Cin he’d kissed in the garden tonight and to renounce the Plumed Menace his parents had put a price on. The latter seemed to be winning.
“Thenwhybe the Plumed Menace?” Prince Lorenz asked, finally.
“I’m not strong; I’ve no power,” he choked out. “How else do I stop them? How else do I save anyone...”
“I don’t know,” the prince whispered. “But it shouldn’t be this, right?”
Cin sniffled. “It’s all I have.”
“It’s... wrong.”
Cin wiped at his cheeks, then his nose. He could feel the stain of the blood left on his face after. Marking him. “I never claimed to be good. Or gentle.” He barked, a sharp, short sound. “I told you, I didn’t come to marry a prince.”
He could feel Prince Lorenz’s gaze on him, cold and deep as the heart of a lake in winter. “But youdidcome,” he said, finally, and Cin could not for the life of him decide what that meant. The prince stood. He did not pull Cin up with him. “If we just leave him here...”
Cin shook his head. “I killed him. I deserve to take responsibility.”
“This will not look good, you know.” Prince Lorenz stated it so bluntly, like he didn’t know how to feel about it. Or, perhaps, likehe felt nothing. “A man of wealth, so near to the castle—it’ll bring back the rumors of my brother’s disappearance, founded or not.”
“I am aware,” Cin said, but he didn’t mean it. As much as he tried desperately to hold onto the weight of the situation as he stepped back, pulling three feathers off his cloak—he’d have no reason to wear it again—he could think of nothing but the nauseous shock of losing Prince Lorenz like this.
It was only two weeks before their time would already have been up, he told himself.
But moving on like this: leaving himself as a bitter taste in the mouth of the man he’d so enjoyed, even cared for...
It made Cin sick in the worst way. He forced himself to move, his body reacting sluggishly, and he could barely feel his fingertips as he pressed the feathers he’d pulled into the side of the dead man’s neck. There: it was done.
He turned his full attention back on Prince Lorenz, and wished suddenly there was more light—that he could see every wrinkle and depth to the prince’s face. Every pain, even if that pain was caused by Cin. “Will you tell anyone?”
