Page 209 of Infernal Secrets

I turned on the fan at the foot of the bed and slid beneath the covers, reaching over to turn off the light. I swallowed hard when Zeke curled against my side. “You okay?”

He moved his head from side to side, his soft hair brushing against my skin. “I don’t want her to die,” he whispered.

I lifted my arm so he could burrow closer to me, wrapping it around his shoulder. With a sigh, I spoke a truth I’d denied even to myself. “I don’t think I do either.”

Zeke mumbled something unintelligible before his breathing evened out, leaving me alone in the dark with my thoughts.

Even if I wanted more time to investigate Raelynn and what brought her into our lives, the council wouldn’t allow it. She posed a threat to their rule by existing.

Ezra said his father believed as much. And if Cornaith believed something, it was as good as law. He’d never allow anything to exist that made him appear weak before the Elyrdin people.

While I agreed Raelynn posed a threat, I didn’t think she deserved to die for it.

Not anymore.

Not after what happened in her kitchen when I took her necklace away.

The memory of her face twisted in grief still haunted me. It messed with my head. I didn’t know what to believe anymore—and the more Zeke and Ash pushed, the more confused I got.

I loosened my fingers on Zeke’s arm when he made a small noise of discontent after I tightened them. His stomach gurgled, and I prayed he wouldn’t wake needing to vomit.

It was possible Raelynn made us sick. Not because she was our mate.

She was the infection.

As soon as the thought formed, I dismissed it.

While she burned through my system like a virus in ways no illness could, the others didn’t see her that way. They wouldn’t accept our sickness as another sign of magical manipulation, because they no longer saw her as the evil we thought she was days ago.

Ash and Zeke probably never accepted it. I didn’t even know if I believed it anymore, even knowing she was a threat to us.

I glanced down at Zeke’s face. The moonlight from the window was enough for me to make out the furrow in his brow and the grim set of his lips in sleep.

Raelynn remained a threat, just maybe not in the way I originally thought.

I closed my eyes.

None of it mattered. Tomorrow she’d die, and I’d go back to the way things were.

Predictable.

Safe.

A lie I almost believed.

51

JUDGMENT

RAE

My legs wobbled from disuse, and my stomach cramped as two men in black fatigues led me out of the courtyard, through the fog bank, and toward the clearing beyond.

The first thing I noticed was the stillness that settled over everything the moment we stepped out of the bordering fog onto barren ground cracked like salt flats, corroded and stretching outward in all directions.

Dead trees with pale, artichoke-shaped blooms lined the clearing’s edge, branches sagging under the weight of blackened vines and shriveled foliage.

The prison’s courtyard stayed walled off by dense fog that rose into a sky of the same color, making it hard to know where it ended, but the clearing differed. A bluish-grey haze clung low, rolling over the cracked ground. At the ring’s edge it blurred and rose into what looked like fog on Earth.