The Deepest Night

Chapter 24

Shed this skin.

He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. He felt wrapped in flames, tortured by the simplest sensations: the weave of the sheets. The revolting smell of the dried meat. The dampness of the night.

His heart, too large in his chest now, too large and too desperate to get out, because it hammered and hammered against his bones with such violence it would splinter him into a million pieces. Every bit of him smashed, right down to his cells.

Only her touch was still right. Only Lora’s hand, lax around his, felt like the anchor he so greatly needed.

Armand remembered what Rue had written about the first Turn of the drákon as if he’d composed the words himself: It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt so very much that you will wish you could die.

But he couldn’t die yet. He hadn’t saved his brother yet. He hadn’t confronted his father. He’d never even kissed the girl he loved, not really, and if he died here, tonight, she’d be the only one who’d ever truly know what happened.

It would ruin her, the burden of that secret. Somehow he knew that it would.

Finish this life.

The Turn was building inside him, a tidal wave of smoke and disintegration so colossal it blotted out everything but his fear.

He dug his fingers into the sheets and stared up at the black timbered ceiling.

Shed this skin. Finish this life. In the twinkling of an …

The dam of his willpower crumbled, spent.

The air went to syrup, too thick to breathe.

His heart slowed. Slowed.

Stopped.

He couldn’t die—