Ryker assessed her for a long moment before he nodded.
“I believe you. But that doesn’t negate that even if you don’t know what it is, Jelisette certainly does. The Black Night is a rebel organization, and she’s one of their members.”
He said the words with as much certainty as one would when declaring the grass was green.
Brynleigh knew rebels existed within the Republic. But this. This was a joke. It had to be a joke, right? How could her Maker be a part of this? If the Black Night were who Ryker said they were, and Jelisette was working with them…
She stared at the fae captain, waiting for him to laugh and tell her this was a prank, but he didn’t.
Her heart throbbed, and she couldn’t wrap her mind around this. First, the Binding. Now, a rebel?
How could Jelisette be one of the people hell-bent on overthrowing the current structure of the Republic of Balance? She’d been at the Masked Ball when the rebels’ bomb went off. She was the one who saved Brynleigh’s life.
It didn’t make sense.
It couldn’t.
Except, deep in the back of Brynleigh’s mind, a niggling sensation insisted this might make the tiniest bit of sense. Jelisette had hidden her Binding. Why was it impossible that she’d hidden this, too?
Maybe every single fucking thing Jelisette had ever said or done was a lie.
Maybe Brynleigh was just an Isvana-damned naive idiot who believed everything she was told.
She curled her fists. Had Jelisette and Zanri laughed at her expense? Had they played games with her, finding her gullibility amusing?
Brynleigh had trusted them. She thought they were looking out for her. Maybe the actual game had been to see how many lies she would believe before she found them out.
Minutes went by, and Brynleigh considered everything she’d learned today. The rebels, the Binding, the deception.
No matter which angle she took, she kept arriving at the same conclusion: she’d been played. If Jelisette was a rebel, then everything—everything—had been a lie.
The game, the rules, and Brynleigh’s involvement in the Choosing had all been part of something far bigger than her.
And that meant…
Fuck it all.
Curling her fists, Brynleigh drew in a deep breath. She was done.
This would either be the biggest mistake of her life, or it would bring her to freedom.
Looking at Ryker, she asked, “What do you need me to do?”
CHAPTER 6
Two Options
Ryker was exhausted. He’d thought the Choosing had been draining, but the marriage competition had nothing on the past day.
He had taken no pleasure in telling Brynleigh about Emery Sylvain’s death, nor did he enjoy watching her reaction. Seeing her be sick had twisted his stomach in the worst of ways.
“It’s not going to be easy,” he warned, meeting her gaze.
Whenever he looked at her, he imagined her in Emery’s place. It was her broken body on the ice. Gray. Staked. Lifeless.
It made him want to burn the world.
“Nothing ever is,” she said.