Chapter 136 136
Amarien's POV
Pain is the first thing I feel.
Like my body has been dragged through something thick and left to dry.
My eyelids flutter, and cold, damp stones greet me.
For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The ceiling above me is low and cracked, with shadows pooling in its corners. The air smells like iron and mildew.
Then the memory crashes back.
The shrine.
The rustle in the bushes.
The cloth over my face.
I sit up too quickly, and the world tilts. My head throbs. And then I saw why it felt like I was suffocating. I was surrounded by bars.
Thick iron bars.
“Don’t look so surprised.”
His voice slides through the dimness. My stomach drops before I even see him.
I lifted my gaze, and there he was.
Daevir stands just beyond the bars, hands clasped loosely behind his back. The torchlight from the corridor casts shifting gold across his face, carving shadows along his jaw.
He looks older.
Harder.
His eyes are not the eyes I once knew.
“Apparently, you’re not as invisible as you believed,” he continues calmly, almost conversationally.
Anger burns through the fog in my head.
“You dare take me from my shrine?” I say, pushing myself to my feet despite the lingering dizziness. “Release me!”
The command falls flat between us.
He doesn’t move or blink.
“Get me out!” I repeat, stepping closer to the bars.
The iron is cold when my fingers wrap around it.
His gaze drifts over me slowly.
“You don’t command anything here, Amarien.”
My jaw tightens.
“You have no right to imprison me.”
A muscle ticks in his cheek.
“No right?” he repeats quietly.
Something in his tone shifts.
He steps closer to the bars now, close enough that I can see the faint scar along his brow.
“You took something from me,” he says.
I stiffen.
“I took nothing.”
His eyes flash.
“My son is blind.”
“He cannot see my face. Or his own reflection,” Daevir continues, voice tightening despite his effort to remain composed. “He will never see again because of you.”
My grip on the bars loosens slightly.
“I did not blind him,” I say quietly.
“You expect me to believe that?” he snaps.
The calm façade fractures.
“You think it is a coincidence? That my son loses his sight and you lurk in forests and shrines?”
“I did not touch him,” I insist.
He laughs once, short and hollow.
“Now I am pressed with an impossible task,” he continues, ignoring me. “An impossible quest.”
His gaze sharpens, cutting.
“The Shaman says his sight can be restored,” he says. “If I find his mother. If I unite him with her beneath the moon.”
The words hang between us.
“I found him in a river,” he says instead. “Alone. Abandoned. How could I possibly find his mother when the woman who did this thing is walking scot free!”
My heart lurched. I had no idea.
Ares isn't his biological child?!
He steps even closer to the bars now, so close I can feel the heat of him through the cold iron.
“I know that every path of ruin in my life traces back to you.”
The anger rises so fast it nearly chokes me.
“You dare kidnap me,” I spit, stepping closer to the bars, “while I’m mourning my child?”
My voice echoes against the stone.
“That shrine was for my child.”
Daevir’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t look away.
“It was also my child!” he says, low and controlled. “And I didn’t become homicidal because I lost my child!”
The word slaps the air between us.
“Homicidal?” I laugh, “You think my grief is madness?”
“I think destroying the innocent because of your grief is dangerous!”
“You know nothing about my grief.” I pulled away from the bars, steadying my breathing so I don't burst out crying.
He exhales sharply, like he’s restraining something.
“You think you are the only one who lost something?” he asks.
“Yes!” I snap. “Because I carried him!!”
The words come before I can soften them.
“I carried him,” I repeat, my voice breaking now despite my fury. “I felt him move. I felt him breathe inside me. And then…”
Silence.
The torch crackles somewhere down the corridor.
“You left me,” I say, the words trembling out of me now. Tears streamed down my face. “You left me to rot in that nunnery!”
His head jerks slightly at that.
“You left me to be shamed. To be tortured.”
“That was not…”
“You left me to get killed!” I shout, the sound tearing from my throat. “Those nuns would have killed me.”
His face darkens.
“They wanted to. They'll go to anything to purge the curse that has inflicted the palace!” I continue, my chest heaving. “They said I was an illness. They said it was divine punishment that I die!”
“I placed you there to protect you!” he fires back.
“Protect me?” I laugh again, bitter and hollow. “By abandoning me?”
“I sent Orgah!” he snaps, his composure finally cracking. “I sent her to protect you!”
My shoulders dropped when I remembered the kind nun who gave me food, shelter, and a resting place for my baby, yet I threw it all in her face and paid for it.
“Orgah…” I muttered. “Is she…is she alive?” Tears flowed down my face.
His eye flickers with lines of tears. “She is retired now. Married to Zephyr.” And then his eyes turned angry. “But she won't be coming anywhere near the woman who tries to kill my son.”
Anger blazed in my heart. “I won't want to be near the man who left my child to die.”
His eyes flicker.
“You think I didn’t know that place was harsh? You think I didn’t plan to bring you back once it settled?”
“It never settled,” I say coldly.
Silence.
I grip the bars harder.
“You never came!”
His shoulders tense.
The truth lingers there, ugly and unresolved.
“You left me,” I repeat more quietly now. “And our child died.”
The words are heavier this time.
He looks away for the first time.
“You think I don’t know loss?” he mutters.
“I know you don’t know this loss.”
I step closer, until the iron presses into my skin.
“Do you know how it feels,” I whisper, my voice trembling despite my effort to steady it, “to bleed and know there is no life left inside you?”
His breath stills.
“Do you know how it feels to wake up and your body still aches as if he is there…but he isn’t?”
He says nothing.
“Do you know how it feels to hold something that was supposed to be a future,” I continue, my throat tightening painfully, “and realize you are holding a memory instead?”
His shoulders drop slightly.
Just slightly.
“I don't even remember what he smells like. It's all gone!” Tears rolled down my cheek.
“It was not just your loss,” Daevir says more quietly. “He was ours,”
“And yet I mourned him alone.”
That seems to land.
He was quiet.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
The words sit there, simple and devastating.
He rubs a hand down his face slowly.
“Our child died,” I say again, softer now, the fury drained and leaving only the ache. “Do you know how that feels?”
He doesn’t answer immediately.
His eyes lift to mine, and for the first time since I woke in this cell, I see something other than anger.
Something fractured.
Something that looks dangerously close to regret.