Why? He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to shake her, throttle her, until she answered. Rin, what the fuck?
But he knew why.
He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she’d intended. And that made everything—hating her, loving her, surviving her—so much harder.
And yet.
And yet, when he looked at that broken body, all he wanted to do was howl.
Now here they were again: three people—children, really; too young and inexperienced for the roles they’d inherited—holding the fate of Nikan in their hands. And Rin was poised to acquire the empire Riga had wanted, if only she could be just as cruel.
But what kind of emperor would Riga have been? And how much worse would she be?
Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.
Their eyes met. She felt a shock of horror.
She recognized the way he was looking at her. It was how she'd once looked at Altan. It was the way she’d seen Daji look at Riga—that look of wretched, desperate, and reproachful loyalty.
It said, Do it.
Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you.
Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.
She almost took that for permission.
But if she did, if she broke through his soul and took everything she wanted...
All she could do was watch. And some sick, desperate part of her wanted to watch, found some perverse glee in staring as the flowers withered and crumpled into ash, because she wanted to see how far the hopelessness would go, and because the destruction felt good— the wanton erasure of life and hope felt good, even if the hope going up in smoke was her own.
Kitay had been the first to reach out with his fingers, and then all three of them were holding hands, Nezha and Rin on either side of Kitay, and it felt and looked absolutely, terribly wrong and still Rin never wanted to let go.
Was this how Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt? What were they like at the height of their empire? Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?
They must have. No matter how much they despised one another later, so much that they’d precipitated their own deaths, they must have loved one another once.
“You should have killed me.”
“But I never wanted you dead.”
“Then why?
“Duty. You couldn’t understand.”
She’d wanted someone else to fight her battles for her, because she was so, so exhausted.
“We were from nowhere, so we wanted to rule everywhere.”
Nostalgia gnawed Rin's chest at the mere sound of Nezha's voice. She wanted this familiarity with him back, too. Never mind that thirty seconds ago she'd been ready to kill him. His voice, his very presence, made her heart ache-she wished desperately they could be caught in a stalemate, that for just one minute the wars surrounding them could be suspended, so that they might speak like friends again. Just once.