“Do you really believe he deserves to live?” I asked.
Anton knew whom I meant. “No,” he admitted. “But I see in him every day what I could have become if the throne wasn’t taken from me. If I were in his place, I’d like to think I had a chance at redemption.”
I nodded slowly. “Then I will go to him one last time.”
He held steady to my hand, and his gaze searched through me. “Are you certain? Is this your choice, Sonya? I don’t want my desires to ever persuade you in anything.”
There was so little difference now between his aura and my own. We both knew what we must do. “Trust me,” I said, and laced my fingers through his. “And trust what is in my heart. My feelings for you are here when I am alone, when you are miles from the palace. I keep you with me. I choose to. You are the most impossibly stubborn person I have ever met. You are also the most honorable, the most caring. I love every part of you.”
A tremor ran across his brow as I said the word love. Even now, I felt him guarding himself from me.
“Our souls are fitted for each other, not because an old Romska woman foretold it, but because we choose them to be.”
The prince’s chest rose and fell. The indomitable barrier around his heart, at last, came crashing down.
“This feeling inside me is mine,” I said. “I am blessed to know you share it.”
Behind him, Tosya softly smiled and turned away, granting us the only measure of privacy he could. Anton reached past the bars to cup my face. Every time he’d beheld me in the past, his eyes carried a measure of pain. And now that pain transformed into the ache of luminous joy, only dimmed because this might be our last moment together.
I would not waste it.
Tears blurred my vision. “I love you, Anton.”
He pulled me close, as close as the bars would allow. The space between them was just large enough for him to kiss me. And he did.
He gave me every breath of his aura. It filled my body with light, with strength, with a beauty I had never known. It couldn’t cleanse away everything I had suffered, every dark mistake I had made, every loss. Nor could mine erase his, all his loneliness, all the betrayals of those he had trusted. But our union was a haven from it all, a place for healing and hope. It felt like home. A home neither one of us had been able to depend on until now.
When he drew away, it wasn’t with any regret for the vulnerability he’d just allowed himself. That same light still sang through my veins and reflected his. “Please go now, while you can,” he said, kissing me briefly one last time.
I nodded and stood with more iron in my bones, more resolve to do what had to be done—and, for the first time, also with unequivocal determination. I removed the jail master’s cloak and Yuri’s cape and draped them over their bodies to give them what honor I could and what peace I could offer Anton and Tosya, who must share this room with them a while longer. I already sensed the guilt eating away at the prince for having had to kill a man.
Teeth gritted, I slid the knife out from the jail master’s belly and retrieved the dagger from his hand. I took Yuri’s pistol from his holster and tossed the weapons into a bed of straw past the bars. “Swear to me you will defend yourselves, if necessary.”
“We will,” Tosya answered for both of them. “Be careful, Sonya.” His aura held me with brotherly affection.
I nodded and stepped over the dead bodies, my heart clenching for Pia’s lost soldier. At the threshold of the open door, I turned my gaze once more to Tosya and Anton. “I will come back.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I STUMBLED THROUGH THE MAZE OF THE DUNGEONS. ABOVE the stone ceiling, more muffled shots of musket fire rang out. Distant shouts came as a growing roar, like I was nearing a massive waterfall. My heart pounded faster, harder. The auras of the peasant army rushed inside my breast and gave me fierce courage. I hurtled onward through the darkness.
Boom!
A huge blast echoed through the corridor and shook the ground and the very foundations of the palace. I crashed to my knees. The ceiling split apart with fissures. Chunks of stone rained down around me. I cried out as the panic of the servants, guards, and nobles burned like acid through my veins. My hand flew to the wall and groped for support as cramps of nausea racked my body.
The shaking stopped, but my terror still seized me. It seized everyone. I pressed my fists to the sides of my head and rocked back and forth.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t bear the auras of both the oncoming revolutionaries and those fighting in defense of the palace. I couldn’t bear any of them.