Adna has had to live with her guilt since she parted ways with her sister.

She has had to know that a child is growing in her belly that will have both a sister and a cousin. She has to know her secret will come out eventually and it will burn her sister the way that she is burning now. The only thing that she can do is live with the poison in her belly and let it eat away at her.

Affect only her—only her—for as long as she can.

What she does not expect, could never expect, is how her sister would drag Ophanim into this. There is nothing but confusion on her face as she moves forward, her scaled belly swelling with the growing life.

“Ophie?” her confusion washes across her delicate features as she steps forward but it is quickly replaced with dread when she listens to him. Her heart stops cold and she just shakes her head. “I-I,” she stumbles over her words, swallows hard. “I don’t know what to say. I am so sorry.” It seems like all she does these days is apologize and she is not sure she will ever reach a time when the apologies don’t come so easily.

“It’s my fault, Ophie. It’s all my fault. I have made such a mess of things.”

She looks behind her to the woods and hopes against hope Beth is not nearby. That he is doing something else—avoiding her, perhaps—but anything but close enough to overhear this.

When her gaze comes back to the angelic boy in front of her, she just sighs.

“I don’t know what to do,” she chokes out. “I can’t seem to do anything right anymore.”

He has always been such a kind boy, and it is no mystery to Adna why she had cared for him so fiercely in her youth. He had always been there with a smile, a kind word, and a heart that never stopped growing. How could she, as guarded and poisonous as she was, not want to keep something like that around?

How could she ever possibly push something like that away?

But not, with him sidling next to her, she wonders at the way that fierce, youthful crush had faded into something softer—something more platonic. She can only wonder at how different he is from Beth and how she could not have gone in a further direction. She thinks about the bay stallion with his granite jaw and the words that come so slowly, so deliberately, and so often without a shred of warmth within them.

She thinks about the way her heart bruises against her ribcage whenever she thinks of Beth—

she wonders if that is how he feels when he thinks about Starsin.

“I can’t,” she says softly, dropping her head and looking at the ground.

She feels tears burning the back of her sage green eyes but she holds them back for now because she is just so tired of crying—so tired of being so weak. “You don’t have to kill anyone,” and this comes with a watery laugh, low and deep in her throat as she leans over to push him gently, playfully.

“I can’t even admit it to myself,” she whispers, feeling it scratching at the back of her throat.

There is a beat, a pause of time, a breath when she finally looks up to catch his gaze.

“You didn’t deserve that. You know that, right? Whatever she said, she was wrong.”

She does, she thinks, but she keeps such things to herself.

He was so quick to take the blame—so quick to just breathe it in and let it settle in his veins.

She wishes that he could see himself through her eyes. She wishes that he could see how good he is, how kind, how he has never deserved these injustices that have been played out against him. She wishes that she could tell him how his heart is a beautiful thing and it is to be cherished, to be protected at all costs.

But she does not spit up the truth with him as readily as she does with Beth.

She has some semblance of control and she keeps these thoughts locked tight.

Just a sad smile and a small shake to rid the dust that has settled onto her scales, her hair coming down in soft curves around her jaw. “You are so hard on yourself,” she says and she is a little more earnest with this, hoping that if she says it strongly enough, he will stop fighting it—will just accept the truth of it. “You have always loved your family, your friends, your land. You have been good to them.”

She has known him long enough to know this. At least this much.

There is a piece of her that almost tells him. Almost tells him about how she met a man who feels terribly important and how she doesn’t know how to handle it. How she is carrying his child and doesn’t feel any closer to him. How she dreams of the curve of his jaw and the feel of his warmth but picks fights like the child that she has always been. How he most likely hates her and she wouldn’t blame him if he did.

How he also fathered her sister’s firstborn.

How she carries the secret of it deep within her heart.

But, here, she is a secretive thing and she buries it deep.

“My family of vipers quite likes hating for fun,” she says, hoping to distract him with this.