The Broken Ones (The Malediction Trilogy 0.6)(71)
Marc sobbed into her hair, the sound ragged. His lips were pressed against her ear, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, the intention in them would have been clear even without his hand reaching for the knife concealed in his boot.
I moved.
My magic lashed around him, binding his limbs, prying his fingers from Pénélope, the sound of bones snapping and popping out of joint making my stomach twist. Marc didn’t even feel the pain, shrieking only in anguish as Pénélope’s body fell to the floor.
“Stop,” I said. “Marc, you need to stop this.”
His face twisted toward me, eyes bloody from capillaries bursting and reforming, his fractured features full of manic hate. “Let me go.”
“No.”
He howled, magic rising against mine with a strength I hadn’t known he possessed. Too much, enough that he’d burn out his life, and so I clamped down on it, contained it. Fury spewed from his mouth, a tide of hate. Things I’d thought of myself but never once believed he thought of me. And though I knew it was motivated by her loss, that did not make them less true. “Stop.”
“Why must it always be your way?” he screamed. “Let me go!”
“No.”
Ana?s shouldered past me, falling to her knees and pulling her sister into her arms. “Penny, Penny, no!” She was shaking, face coated with tears. Lifting her face, her gaze latched on mine. “Tristan…”
A broken plea for me to help her. To make this right.
But I couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said, then backed away, dragging Marc with me. Jamming magic into his mouth to silence him, because I was too much of a coward to hear anything more. The twins stood at the doorway, shoulders sagging. “Help her.”
The corridor was a blur of papered walls and carpet. Of servants staring wide-eyed as I dragged their master down the hall and into what had been his father’s rooms. My hands were shaking and icy, but I tied him to the bed. “I’m not letting you die.”
He answered me with a gaze full of hate.
The tool Pénélope had given me lurked in the back of my thoughts, but I was afraid to use it. Afraid of how such power would change our friendship. Whether it would even exist if I did.
And so my vigil began.
* * *
Days passed. Then weeks. Exhaustion like nothing I’d ever known gripped me, the few moments when the twins watched over Marc, or helped force food down his throat, not enough to compensate for the drain of watching his fury fade, his grief return, and then even that disappear along with his will to live.
My father came once.
I felt his presence behind me, and if he had told me that I was wasting my time, that my energy was better dedicated to the tree or other ventures, I think I might have tried to kill him where he stood.
“He has to find within himself the will to live,” he said. “To make him otherwise endure will only have consequences.”
“I know.”
“Not everything in this world is within your power to control.”
I turned to meet his gaze. “Nor yours.”
His eyes dug into me for a long time, then he nodded and silently left the room.
My vigil continued.
* * *
“He’s not getting any better.”
Ana?s sat across the bed from me, dressed in black, the lace across her throat eerily similar to the bonding marks on Marc’s fingers. She was different already, I could tell. A ruthlessness simmering around her that hadn’t been there before.
“I know.”
“Everyone thinks you should let him go. That to keep him alive like this is cruel.”
“No.”
She nodded slowly, then said, “I want to hate him. To blame him for taking her away from me. For killing her.”
“He didn’t kill her.” My voice rasped against my dry throat, but I was too tired to reach for a glass of water.
“Yes, he did.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to leave – that I didn’t have the patience to argue with her, but then she said, “But he was also the only one who let her live.”
Taking Marc’s hand, she lifted it to regard his blackened bonding marks. “The rest of us thought that what mattered was keeping her wrapped up in a safe little box, protected from anything and anyone who might hurt her. Marc was the only one who saw that setting her free was what she needed. He made her happy.” Her voice cracked, and she scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “For her sake, we need to fight for him, Tristan.”
“For all our sakes,” I said.
Ana?s nodded once, then stood, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “Don’t let him die.”
She left the room, leaving me alone with Marc.
And I made my decision.
* * *
“Marcanthysurum.”
It had taken all the nerve I had to put voice to his true name, but I was rewarded when, for the first time in weeks, his head lifted, eyes fixing on mine.
“She told you my name.”
Betrayal. For a heartbeat, I wondered if Pénélope giving up his name to me would be the straw that broke him beyond repair, but his chest still rose and fell with steady breaths.
“Marcanthysurum,” I said. “I want you to believe that you gave me your name of your own volition, as a show of loyalty and goodwill, not that Pénélope betrayed your confidence.”