━━━ ❝ I pity the fool who wants to be a God. ❞
&
━━━ There is enough fire inside you to put
all of Hell to shame, but you are
pretending to be water, for someone
who is too afrai...
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CHAPTER XI. devils will cry
None of it made sense.
By her hand, the Amplifier had allowed Leia, Nina and Jesper to pass, but decided to throw the Squaller after them to the wolves. Why? What part of her plan did they fit into? This was court-level scheming that Leia was not apt in.
Two generations of Valentines came before her, wielding weapons of court and sheer Grisha power. The Valentines were deemed protectors of the kingdom, starting from her mother—the first trio order Grisha who once served two Lantsov kings, then Selma, who served the usurper. As a child, Leia's curiosity of why the Saints had chosen them as Blagoslovennyy had brought countless headaches to her mother.
"Because you are special, my darling." Her mother would kneel before her, twirling her hair with a smile that warmed her young, innocent heart. "We are chosen. May you never, ever forget it."
The thing was, she had long forgotten. Leia Valentine had died, replaced by someone who she didn't quite recognised. Truth be told, she didn't know which Leia was supposed to front. The Maiden of Myth, the Jester, or the Fire Bender? With every step inching deeper into the wolves' den—it was the cold that offered her temporary refuge from her pestering thoughts.
If this was a game of chess, she hoped Kaz hadn't gotten too rusty.
Funny enough, some part of her was humiliated that after all this time, she still gambled on Kaz. The man who had locked her and her freedom from her hands.
He was also the one who set you free, her thoughts said. Another thought thundered by, I set myself free. Two years in Hellgate, and I never broke.
Have you stopped to wonder that maybe it was because you are already broken?
Selma. Leia's steps paused. It seemed like even in here her deepest fears could reach her. This sentence was what Selma wrote in one of her letters, weeks before Alina Starkov's death. Selma's secrets, how dirty and foul, sat in a drawer in Ketterdam—the only relic she had of her sister. It took a Fjerdan guard roughly shoving Leia back in order for her to obey, and she snatched this opportunity to banish the thought about Selma far away.
In more ways than one, Leia was Kaz's leverage. To his thirty million kruge and years of painfully yearned revenge. And to avenge his brother, to destroy the house of Pekka Rollins brick by brick, Kaz needed a crew, needed her. She was his lever and he was her servant, as she was to him.
The Bastard of the Barrel would sell her out, but never Kaz Brekker. So if Leia was a fool for investing her final bits of trust in him, so be it. Maybe revenge would make her whole again. Or maybe it would only fragment it further, until her demons cry that after everything, it still wasn't enough.
