The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(8)

Kestrel coughed. The sound rattled in her lungs.

That night, Kestrel pushed away thoughts of Arin and her father. She tried to remember Verex instead. When she’d first met the prince she’d agreed to marry, she’d thought him weak. Petty, childish. She’d been wrong.

He hadn’t loved her. She hadn’t loved him. Yet they’d cared for each other, and Kestrel remembered how he’d set a soft black puppy into her hands. No one had given her such a gift. He’d made her laugh. That, too, was a gift.

Verex was prob ably in the southern isles now, pretending to be on a romantic excursion with her.

Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish, that the court will ask too many questions the emperor had said as the captain of his guard had held Kestrel and the sour scent of terror rose off her skin. Her father had watched from the other side of the room. This is the tale I’ ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles.

Verex would obey the emperor. He knew what happened to people who didn’t.

The emperor had whispered, After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ ll be dead. You’ ll be mourned.

Her father’s face hadn’t changed. Something fractured inside Kestrel to remember this.

She looked out the bars of her cell but saw only the dark hallway. She wished she could see the sky. She hugged her arms to her.

If she’d been smart, she would have married Verex. Or she would have married no one and joined the military like her father had always wanted. Kestrel tipped her head back against the stone wall with its cushion of mold. Her body shuddered. She knew that this wasn’t just from cold or hunger. It was withdrawal. She craved her nighttime drug.

But it wasn’t simply withdrawal, either, that racked her limbs. It was grief. It was the horror of someone who’d been dealt a winning hand, had bet her life on the game, and then proceeded (deliberately?) to lose.

The next night, Kestrel ate and drank every thing she was given.

“Good girl,” said the silver-haired guard. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. I’ve seen you spill your soup and pretend to drink from a cup. This way”—the woman pointed at Kestrel’s empty bowl—“is better, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Kestrel said, and was tempted to believe it.

She woke to see, in the weak dawn light that filtered from the corridor through the bars to her cell, that she had been drawing in the dirt floor. She jerked upright.

One vertical line, four wings. A moth.

She had no memory of doing this. This was bad. Worse: maybe soon she might not even understand what such a drawing meant. She traced the moth. She must’ve sketched it last night with her fingers. Now they were trembling. Crumbs of dirt shifted beneath her touch.

This is me, she reminded herself. I am the Moth.

She’d betrayed her country because she’d believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?

He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.

But she wanted to.

It occurred to Kestrel that her moods weren’t her own.

She wondered if she’d feel so desolate and alone if she weren’t constantly drugged. In the morning at the mines, when she was a tireless giant and prying sulfur blocks from the ground was an obsession pushed into her by the drug, she forgot how she felt. The worries about whether what she felt was real were far away.

Yet at night before sleep, she knew that her darker emotions, the ones that curled inside her heart and ate away at it, were the only ones she could trust were true.

One day, something was different. The air—hazy and chilled, as usual—seemed to buzz with tension.

It came from the guards. Kestrel listened to them as she filled her baskets.

Someone was coming. There was to be an inspection.

Kestrel’s fast heart picked up even more speed. She discovered that she had not, in fact, lost hope that Arin had received her moth. She hadn’t stopped believing that he would come. Hope exploded inside her. It ran through her veins like liquid sunlight.

It wasn’t him.

If Kestrel had been herself, she would have known from the moment she’d heard about an inspection that it couldn’t be Arin, pretending to have come in some official imperial capacity to inspect the work camp.

What an idiotic, painful idea.

Arin was visibly Herrani—dark-haired, gray-eyed—and scarred in a way that announced his identity to anyone who cared to know it. If he’d received her message, and if he’d understood it, and if he came (she was beginning to despise herself for even contemplating such implausible ifs), every Valorian guard in the camp would arrest him, or worse.

The inspection was just an inspection. From the prison yard that evening, Kestrel saw the elderly man who wore a jacket with a senator’s knot tied at the shoulder. He chatted with the guards. Kestrel winnowed through the prisoners, who milled aimlessly in the yard after a full day’s work, the morning drug still jangling inside their veins as it did in hers. Kestrel tried to get close to the senator. Maybe she could get word to her father. If he knew how she suffered, how she was losing pieces of herself, he would change his mind. He would intervene.