A Court of Death || ACOTAR

54

"This is becoming an alarming habit for you and Az," Cassian remarked, plucking the half empty glass out of Rhys's hand and pouring it out over the edge of the roof. He winced and glanced over to make sure he didn't dump it out on anyone, relaxing when he confirmed it only landed on the streets below and no passerby. "Thinking about Astryn doesn't always have to end drunk and sad, you know."

"I talked to her," Rhys murmured, not having it in himself to glare at the empty glass Cassian still held hostage.

"I know," he said, "Feyre told me. How bad was it?"

"Better than I expected," Rhys answered honestly, "I apologized, and I asked for a chance to make things right and I rambled more than I should have but she listened. She didn't forgive me, but she listened. That's a step."

"The step isn't her listening, it's you actually fucking talking," Cassian corrected, "she would have listened four hundred years ago, three hundred or two or one or however long."

"I know," he conceded with a shallow nod. "This war...I can't stand the thought of it reaching her, of him reaching her. I got...Amarantha is dead. She's gone, I watched her die, and I still find myself sometimes having this terrible pit in my stomach thinking someone will come along and drag me off back to her bed and she'll be there waiting. He's still alive, and he's coming here and I don't want him anywhere near her. She...Azriel said that fucking monster kept her chained to his bed. I want him dead. I want to watch him die and know he can never do that to her again. I want to rid the world of him for her."

"Yesterday you didn't care," Cassian pointed out sharply, his question obvious. Did he care now because he always had and couldn't admit it or did he care now because he was made to feel guilty for not caring?

"I did—I've done nothing that makes this even remotely believable, so I understand if my word means nothing, but I do love her. She's my sister, even if I'm no longer her brother. I hurt her and I failed her but I never didn't care. I just...I was shit at caring about her. I messed up so many times that I didn't know how to do it right. I didn't know how to be her brother."

"I think when you brought her home all those years ago, you thought she could fill the hole your other sister left. But Astryn couldn't fill that hole and it was never her responsibility to do it. She's not her. And I think it tore you up inside that she wouldn't ever be her, that no matter what you did, the sister you grew up with would always be dead."

"Cassian," Rhys snapped, low and warning.

"No," Cassian shot right back, "no, you need to hear it. You saved her and you brought her home and you were still grieving your other sister. And that would have been fine, it would have been okay for you to still be working through that if it didn't become Astryn's burden. She was never going to fill that hole or be the person your other sister was. You let Az walk all over her and you told us all we should lie to her because she wasn't her. If she had been her, it never would have gone down that way. You'd have fucking cut his cock off and shoved it down his throat if he had ever treated her like that, but it wasn't her, it was Astryn. And that made you decide it was okay. You can't even try to say it's not true because you were protective of her before you knew her, when she came out of that cell and you saw her as a blank slate. You were protective of her then. Protective enough that you told Az to keep his distance so she had time to heal and adjust, so she could live. And then she did live, just not how you wanted. You let him get away with how poorly he treated, had us all lie to her and treat her like less than family all for what? To punish her for being herself instead of being a dead girl she'd never met? For being your father's daughter instead of bringing back some part of your mom by being hers?"

"I killed her," Rhys muttered, eyes squeezed shut, "I fucking—I killed her. I killed Astryn. And she just let me do it. Over and over and over until I ripped the bond away from her and Az. I killed her. Every time—I just...every time she bled out in my lap, I wondered if that would be the time she didn't come back. And then I passed out and she was gone and I was sitting there covered in her blood and the blade was still there and I thought about slitting my own throat. I couldn't...my mother, my other sister...they died because of me too. I didn't kill them, but I might as well have."

"Don't tell me you finally thought they had something in common," Cassian muttered shakily, earning a pained, watery, entirely humorless laugh from Rhys.

"I thought...when Amarantha came in, I thought to myself, I'd survive it because, when Astryn was trapped for the first twenty years of her life, she survived that. And because I couldn't just die and leave you all to fend for yourselves against Amarantha. Astryn...I never realized what it was to survive that, what she had been put through. I didn't go through nearly as bad as she did when she was being raised in that cave, but every time I thought about peeling off my skin after Amarantha touched me, I reminded myself of two things. One was that it was better me than you or Az. And two...that it hadn't killed Astryn. I wanted to apologize to her, a long time ago, but I never did because I couldn't face her and then she showed up there and I murdered her for her effort. I spent all that time...I had less than two years with her and I spent most of it resenting the blood in her veins. And then I realized how wrong I was for it all, so fucking soon after she left I realized it."

He paused, blinking back tears and resisting the urge to take a long drink from the bottle he was certain Cassian would confiscate if he touched.

"I never went and apologized to her after I realized how terrible of a brother I'd been because I was a coward. I was terrified of the possibility of trying to earn her forgiveness and failing. But she showed up to try to save me Under the Mountain. I could have...if I hadn't been such a coward, if I had begged for her forgiveness years ago, she would have been safe in Velaris with you all. But she wasn't. Because I was a coward. She ended up chained to the King of Hybern's bed because of me."

"What he did to her is not on you," Cassian said sharply, "don't ever think that. Don't fucking...that is not your fault. He's a sick, twisted monster. And don't you dare think you deserved a single second of what Amarantha did to you."

Rhys's silence was answer enough about what he believed.

"Rhys, look at me," Cassian demanded, and Rhys forced himself to comply, "you were a shitty brother, that's true. But the rest of it? Not a chance. He's the one who did that to her, not you. And no one—no one deserves what you went through. You fucked up with Astryn, but that doesn't mean you deserved to be used like that by Amarantha or that you're responsible for what the King did to her."

"I want to be her brother again," Rhys murmured, "but it's so fucking hard to let myself think about her. I'm a coward for it but it hurts. I didn't tell Feyre about her because I just couldn't. I couldn't stand the idea that she would look at me like I was a terrible monster when she learned the truth. I didn't want her to look at me like that. And I didn't want to deal with the pain or the guilt. I know I'm not the victim here, I'm the one who broke things, but it hurts and it hurts even worse because I know it's my own fault."