Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(49)

“You can’t do that. Not yet,” Lozar wheezes.

“What?” That sensation is back—one of a buzzing gliding along the inside of my head. I’ve been so consumed in my thoughts, I didn’t realize Lozar was observing them, too.

“You cannot kill the prince—not—” He struggles to speak over my protest, holds a finger in the air. “Not until you uncover where the weapon is kept.”

I pace around the cramped cell. Castian would never tell me willingly. I’d have to rip every memory from his mind until I uncovered his secrets.

“How often do the guards check on you?”

“Before they forgot I was in here?” Lozar asks weakly. “Once every week, maybe longer.”

I don’t have a week. If I break out now, I’ll be outnumbered by the guards before I find Castian. If I stay here until my so-called trial, he could move the weapon before I get to it.

“You know what you must do,” Lozar says. “Stay for more than your vengeance.”

I think of Esteban and Margo. They never trusted me. They never wanted me in their unit. They didn’t believe I was part of the cause. When you’re alone for so long you forget how to depend on others, how to have others depend on you. I don’t know how to be more than myself. The moment I found Celeste dead, I knew things would be different, but I didn’t think it’d be so soon. Dez was my hope. The Whispers’. His father’s, too.

Stay for more.

How can I do more with a power that is only meant to take? Perhaps for the first time, my power is the only thing I can count on to see me through.

We’re silent for a long time, Lozar’s breath so labored I fear he’s going to die before he can get the words out. He says with a small gasp of realization, “You are one of the stolen Moria children.”

“I was.”

“With this weapon—what’s to stop the king and the justice from repeating their sins?”

“That’s why I came here,” I say.

“But your resolve is weakening because of your thirst for vengeance.”

He coughs, blood dribbling down his chin from the corner of his mouth. “He named you, Renata. When he could not escape, he still remembered your name. You must stay for more.”

I shut my eyes against the sting of tears, swallow my guilt. I take a deep breath to steady myself. His words anchor me, and it’s like wading out of the thick fog of my anger.

“I can help you,” Lozar tells me.

When I close my eyes, I visualize my fingers pressed against Prince Castian’s temples. I can see the light of his life extinguished. I see myself retrieving the wooden box and destroying the wretched cure within. I will savor that moment, my last, and give the Whispers a way to keep fighting.

“How?”

Lozar doubles over, nearly coughing up his lung. He’s going to die in this cell, and no one is going to notice. A desperate swell of tears rushes to my eyes. I wipe them away and grab hold of the bars in the narrow window.

“Mercy.”

Slowly, I turn at the word. Watch as he hacks up more fluid. His eyes turn to the sound of my breathing. His extended hand trembles, shaking the rest of him. I force myself not to look away.

Mercy.

“You can’t ask me to do that.” I do not know this man well, but I am sure as the sky is blue that I cannot take his life.

“They have forgotten me. What if they take me when they come for you? The justice loves the sound of screams. They’ll use the weapon. Mercy, Renata.”

My skin feels like thousands of spiders are hatching beneath it. My lungs are tight, straining to breathe through the smell of rot and disease spreading on his chest.

Mercy.

It is a lovely thing to call murder.

As much as I want to turn away, to call for guards, I know that if they come they won’t lift a finger to help Lozar. The justice has dozens of ways to keep a body alive in order to inflict pain. I cannot save this man. But I can’t deny him this.

Mercy for Lozar. I’ll use up whatever mercy I have so that I won’t have any left for the prince or myself. My arms shake, my legs give beneath me.

“You must do something for me first,” I say.

The cell feels darker somehow. He touches my hand, and I feel him in my thoughts again. “You need the justice to trust you. This is a start.”

“I must prevent Justice Méndez from being able to use my power. I will show you mercy, if you will do this for me.”

Lozar nods. “I have no strength left. But Dez. He dropped a weapon here. He couldn’t find it before they took him.”

I crawl to the corner where Lozar was when I first noticed him. When I pat the ground for what feels like forever, something pricks me. I wrap my hand around a small dagger. Even before I bring it to the center of the room where there is the faintest light, I know it is the knife Dez carried in his boot. The handle is a rough wood, nothing ornate. But it’s the first knife he ever made. Even if he’d found it, what could it have done against all those guards?

“There might be another way,” I say.

“There is nothing left of me, Renata. Do not suffer my fate.”

I wrap my arms around his body.

His heartbeat murmurs against my skin. He lets go of a sigh, relaxing into my hold. When I first got to the Whispers stronghold in ángeles, I was too angry to be around the other children, and so I worked in the kitchen. It was Dez who taught me to hunt wild game—rabbits, turkeys, deer. It was the cook who taught me how to snap their necks. At the end of the day, we are as frail as our prey.