Page 111 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

“The lower. Why?”

“Wrong. Try again.”

My eyes narrowed. “The…dark? And again, why?”

“That’s correct.” He drummed his fingers on the table, though the sound wasn’t exactly usual, with a few of those fingers splinted together. “Upper and lower is a segregation that high fae like to use, and it has been heavily adopted by Odessa.”

“Okay,” I drawled. “Why does⁠—”

“What are their names?”

“Names? Mina. Ledigh. Droxus. And…?” I grimaced.

Not only was the lower—or dark—pantheon not something we learned about extensively in Odessa, it had been years since I’d learned about them. I’d also not come prepared for a fucking exam.

Jasper tsked and shook his head. “Wrong again. Ledigh is Mina’s hellhound. Idroxas is the second. Arka the third. Yveil the fourth.”

Oh, goddess help us both—I should not have agreed to meet Jasper.

Despite what I wanted to believe, I’d gained no handle on the volatile state of my feelings towards my old friend. Sitting in front of him like this, being berated with questions I didn’t understand the purpose of, only compounded my irritation further.

“Well, thank you so much for clarifying that for me, Jasper.” I didn’t miss the way his body tensed when I bit out his assumed name. “Are you going to make me ask you why you’re telling me this again, or…?”

“Good to see your patience hasn’t changed.” His sigh was infuriating as he stood and grabbed a tome from the end of the table.

He set it in front of me with a thud, rifling through a few pages before landing on one that had four intricate sigils drawn on it, the names of the four dark pantheon gods beneath each.

“If there is anything you prioritize learning, it needs to be our gods and what they represent on more subtle levels. There could be aspects of each incorporated into your trials that the other contestants will know easily, and you need to know what to look for. The sigils are only the start of it, and I’d wager a guess you know nothing else of them. If you were presented with three samples of indigenous flora and told to eat two, would you know which one Mina gives to her disciples in times of need? Or which one Arka uses to poison his foes?”

My hands tightened around the armrests, and my hold on my composure slipped enough for me to bite back, “Right. The naïve outsider needs someone to hold their hand and tell them stories meant for children, is that it? Because clearly, I’ve never been educated a day in my life and couldn’t handle any of this on my own.”

For a tense second, Jasper just observed me before he lowered back into his chair. He pulled the tome back and flipped through it. “Despite what we were taught to believe, an Odessan education is not all that it’s made out to be, Nor.”

And there my grasp went entirely. Nerve. Struck.

“Of course it isn’t,” I scoffed. “So that’s why you left, then? The pursuit of higher education? There was something in the illustrious Wastes we couldn’t offer you?”

His attention snapped up, clearly surprised, before he shook his head. “No,” he said carefully. “That’s not why.”

“So what was the reason?” I tipped my head and forced a smile. “Grew tired of the mages and the pressure, so you just…left? I know that’s what your shitty note said, but I’ve never believed a word of it.”

A muscle feathered in his jaw, and he flipped the tome shut. “Drop it, Nora. You will not get the answer you want from me.”

Oh, I was going to get an answer from him one way or another, and I went straight for the jugular. “It was me, then, wasn’t it? You left because of me?”

Jasper tensed.

“When I kissed you at that Turning party, I thought you wanted it as badly as I did. You certainly acted like you did. Clearly, I misread everything, because you just fucking vanished after that, and you didn’t even have the goddess-damned balls to tell me I’d crossed some line I didn’t know existed.” I let out a shaky breath.

“Do you know how badly that fucked with my head? How many years I spent thinking there was something wrong with me because of you?”

Uttering those words to him, after all these damned years, should have lifted some of the weight off my chest. Instead, it only made it harder to breathe.

“It was not you, Nora. You had nothing to do with it.”

How I hadn’t combusted yet, I wasn’t sure, but all I wanted to do was scream.

“Then tell me the truth, Jasper. Help me understand what made it so easy for you to leave. Help me understand why turning your back on everything was the only option. You broke my fucking heart like it was nothing to you, and I–”