Chapter 154

Kade

She told me in the dark, with her back to me.

I think she couldn’t have done it any other way. She lay on her side facing the window, with my arm over her, and told it all to the glass. The bowl. The candle. The power going out of her all at once, so that the lights in the training hall flickered and burst and Ryan’s whole drill stopped in the yard. Something pulling at it from outside her. And then what Imogen had said, sitting back on her heels on the mats, with her hands not quite steady.

Light runs both ways along a thread.

When she had finished, I didn’t say anything for a long time.

I lay with my arm over her and felt the thing in my chest. I had felt it every hour of every day for six weeks. I knew its weight and its shape, the way it lay curled under Knox, the cold of the threads running out from it into my ribs and up my throat. I had thought I knew what it was. Something she had put in me to kill me, slowly. A wound that wou