Deception

Chapter Fifty-Eight RACHEL

Sunlight paints the backs of my eyelids red and sends a piercing shaft of pain straight into my brain. I try to lift my hands to push at the ache, but my arms refuse to move.

“Rachel,” a voice says in a mocking, singsong rhythm. “I know you’re in there. Come out and play.” Something hard slaps my cheek, and the pain in my head doubles.

The familiar voice has lost its flirtatious charm, and the truth sinks into me like poison.

Ian.

Ian blew up the smoke bomb, dragged me through a side street, knocked me out, and . . . and what? I force my eyes to open, and immediately squint against the daylight that floods my head with agony.

“Oh, good. You’re awake,” he says, and I see him, crouched before me, his eyes glowing with hate like it’s the only thing keeping him alive.

I turn away and scan my surroundings. I’m inside the Wasteland, propped up against a thick oak in the middle of a vast sea of trees packed so close I can barely see the sky. Nowhere near the path. Probably nowhere near Lankenshire if Ian’s smart. Logan will already be looking for me. And when he finds me . . . I meet Ian’s eyes and bare my teeth in a smile.

“Logan will move heaven and earth to find me.”

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” he says, and a stray beam of sunlight gleams off the thick, double-edged knife in his hands. He flips the blade around to face me and cocks his head.

“We’re going to be traveling a long way, Rachel. Logan has his hands full with Carrington at the moment, but I have no doubt he’ll outsmart them somehow. And then he’ll come to ransom you from Rowansmark with the device, just like my father tried to ransom him.”

“You’re crazy.”

The knife plunges down, slicing through my bandage and digging into burned flesh. I scream as raw agony blisters my arm. Ian watches me with a terrible desperation in his eyes.

When he pulls the knife away, blood bubbles out of the jagged wound and pours over my hand.

He grabs my chin and tilts my face toward him. “You’ll watch your mouth.”

I spit on him.

The knife flashes, and the pain hits, and I scream until my throat fills with tears. Until the agony twists my stomach so that I gag.

“It’s a long journey to Rowansmark,” he says. “And I can inflict a lot of pain.”

My voice is hoarse as I say, “I can take it.”

He smiles, and something inside of me trembles. “There are all kinds of pain, Rachel.”

“You can’t break me,” I say, and I mean it. I’ve already been through hell, and I know I can survive it. I can rise above it. I might break for a little while, but I won’t stay broken forever.

“It will be a delight to prove you wrong,” he says, and yanks me to my feet by the rope around my wrists. “Now start walking. We have a lot of ground to cover before my spineless brother figures out how to bypass the Carrington army that surrounds him.”

“Let her go.”

I turn and see Quinn a few yards from us, lethal fury spilling off of him in waves. Blood pours down the side of his face from a gash in his head, and he sways a little as he stands.

“That’s quite a wound,” Ian says, and smiles. “Almost like someone kicked you in the head. I was actually trying to kill you. Pity.”

“You’ll have to try harder,” Quinn says.

Ian bows, his hands fluttering, and I see a second knife slide out of a wrist sheath and into his hand. The blades are dark gray metal and seem to absorb the sunlight that filters in past the canopy of leaves above us.

“Where did you get those weapons?” I ask, and pressure builds in my chest as the answer comes to me even before the pair of Rowansmark trackers step out of the trees behind us.

That’s going to making catching Ian off guard and killing him a bit more difficult.

“The same place I got all that white phosphorous. And the poison. And the smoke bombs. You didn’t really think I’d come all this way to recover stolen Rowansmark property and neglect to bring a pair of law enforcers and a wagonload of supplies with me, did you?”

We’re at a disadvantage. Ian’s armed. The trackers are armed. And all three are expert killers. I’m injured and tied up with rope, my weapons gone. And Quinn, who doesn’t want to be a weapon any longer, is barely able to stay on his feet.

“It’s okay,” I say to Quinn, because he can’t save me, and I don’t want him to try. I want him to live. Go back to Logan and Willow and live.

The trackers draw their swords. Ian flips both knives around in his palms. And Quinn takes a step toward them.

“Quinn.”

“She knows you can’t save her,” Ian says softly. “You can’t even save yourself.”

“I don’t want to save myself.”

My throat closes, and I whisper, “Quinn, please. Go back.”

“Oh yes, Quinn. Go back. Obey the girl. That’s all you do anyway, right? Obey others?” Ian’s smile is dipped in venom as he moves forward, a tracker on either side.

Quinn looks at me. “I’m going to do the right thing.”

“No.” Tears streak down my face, and I jerk against the rope that holds me.

“Sometimes the right thing costs us the biggest piece of ourselves, but it still has to be done.” He smiles at me, and there’s peace on his face.

He turns to Ian, and the feral rage comes back. “Pretty pathetic that you can’t beat me without the help of not one, but two trackers.” His voice mocks. “If I’m such a whipped dog, what does that make you?”

Ian snarls, and I start grasping at straws. If we separate the three, if Quinn only has to take on one at a time, he has a chance. The only way to separate them is to push Ian past logic and into rage.

“He’s crazy,” I say to Quinn. “Stark, raving mad.”

Ian hisses and turns as if to teach me a lesson.

“Yes,” Quinn says with soft menace. “He’s stark, raving mad. No wonder he needs their help.”

The trackers move toward Quinn, but Ian waves them off, his face purple with rage, his eyes pits of miserable hate. And then he lunges for Quinn, his knives slashing.

Quinn spins, strikes Ian in the face as he passes, and then drops into a crouch. Blood flows down his arm. Ian must have cut him as he passed.

Ian laughs, readies his knives, and comes at Quinn again. This time, Quinn is slower to move out of the way. He deflects Ian’s right arm, sending one of the knives flying onto the mossy ground near me, and then elbows him in the face.

Ian fights like he’s possessed. Slashing, hacking, and lunging with extraordinary grace. Grace Quinn could easily match if he weren’t badly injured already. Quinn punches, parries, and kicks, but he’s tiring. The head injury is slowing his reflexes. The weaker he gets, the harder Ian fights. My chest burns as I realize the truth.

Quinn isn’t going to win.

I fall to my knees and struggle to breathe as Ian slams his fist into the wound on Quinn’s head, and Quinn’s arms go slack. It’s just for a second, but a second is all Ian needs. Raising his knife into the air, he drives it into Quinn’s chest.

“No!” I scream and scream until I have no breath. Tears blur the world into soft silhouettes, and I don’t want blink them away. I don’t want to see Quinn fall to the ground beside me. I don’t want to see blood pouring over the bright green moss.

But Quinn deserves to have a witness to his courage. And I want the last face he sees to be someone who loves him. So I blink the tears away and crawl toward him as he lies on his back, his breath coming in halting, strangled gasps.

His hands grip the knife blade that’s lodged in his chest, and blood seeps slowly through his fingers and onto the forest floor. Somewhere above us, Ian laughs, but I ignore him. Ignore the trackers who are driving a wagon into the clearing. Ignore everything but Quinn lying broken and beautiful beside me.

“Oh, Quinn,” I whisper, and my tears drip from my face onto his.

He moves his lips, and I lean forward until my ear is next to his mouth.

“The knife,” he whispers. “Get it.”

For a moment I think he means he wants me to pull the knife out of his chest, but he isn’t looking at himself. He’s looking at the thick cluster of moss beside my feet. Suddenly, I know the truth, and I can’t bear it.

When he said he was going to do the right thing, he didn’t mean he was going to kill Ian and the trackers. He already knew he was too injured to beat them. He never intended to save us both. He simply wanted to find a way to give me the tools I needed to save myself.

“Rachel, please,” he says, and I can barely hear him.

Grief tears at me with vicious fingers, and I let it take me. Sobbing wildly, I curl toward the forest floor until my hair covers my arms and hands, and my fingers touch the cold metal of a blade. I gather it to me and slide it into my boot, rocking back and forth to cover the motion.

Then I collapse onto Quinn’s shoulder, pressing my palms to his chest, and beg him not to die. Not to leave me, like so many have left me. I beg and cry, and beneath my hands I feel . . . metal.

My fingers curve and scrape as I redouble the volume of my grief while triumph, brilliant and wild, surges through me.

The knife isn’t in Quinn’s chest. It’s lodged in the Dragonskin he wears beneath his tunic. The blood leaking through his fingers isn’t from his heart. He’s gripping the blade tightly, letting his breath become shallow and faint, and hoping no one decides the amount of blood lost isn’t enough to kill him.

I can help with that.

I slide forward until my hair curtains our faces and whisper, “Thank you.”

He smiles.

And then I rip the blade out of his hands, clumsily slash the rope that binds my wrists, and charge Ian. Ian deflects my attack, but I don’t mind. I wasn’t trying to hurt him. That would give the trackers an excuse to take care of matters their own way. I was simply trying to divert everyone’s attention away from Quinn.

Ian laughs as he wrenches the knife from my hands and ignores my pleading to let me stay until Quinn dies. Laughs as he tosses me over his shoulder while I scream and beat at him with my fists and Quinn’s dark eyes close.

Laughs as he tells me he’d promised a lesson in pain, and he’d delivered.

He’s wrong.

The lesson I just learned had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with courage. Sometimes the right thing to do is the thing that costs us the most. For Quinn, that meant putting his life on the line so that the daughter of the man who once saved him could live. For Sylph, it meant loving others without ever asking them to be someone they weren’t. For Logan, it meant setting aside the heartbreak of his childhood to protect the people who once cast him out.

And for me, it means honoring those who’ve loved me and sacrificed for me by choosing to be the kind of warrior who delivers justice even when it threatens to hurt me.

Let Ian laugh. Let him believe pain will ruin me. I know better. I’ve already been ruined once, and I know how to rise from the ashes. I know how to find my broken pieces.

I know how to fight the battles that must be won.

As we move deeper into the Wasteland and the tiny clearing where Quinn lies disappears into shadow, I silently promise myself that I won’t let the sacrifices of those who loved me be in vain. Not while I still have breath in my body.

Ian tosses me to the ground, and I climb to my feet, my chin held high while a single purpose burns fiercely within my heart.

I will do the right thing, no matter what it costs me. I will stop Ian. Tear apart Rowansmark brick by miserable brick until I dismantle the technology they would use to turn the Cursed One against innocent people. And then I will find Logan and help him destroy the Commander. I won’t break. I won’t falter.

I won’t stop until the lives of everyone I’ve lost have been avenged.