“He’s torn apart,” Cass grunted. “There was love between them.”

“Yes,” Mars murmured.

“She took a blade for him.”

Fuck.

“Cass—”

Mars said no more, for Cassius stopped, turned to him, and Mars nearly reared away from the depths of black that had become his eyes.

Cass’s eyes were normally sky blue.

When he felt emotion, the night sky could be seen in them instead.

Now, there was naught of any of that.

There wasn’t even any white.

Just black.

Mars had never seen that, and he’d known Cassius to feel great emotion.

And he did not know what to make of it, except what he knew would not ever happen, even before he’d seen his friend’s eyes as such.

He would not ever make Cassius Laird his enemy.

“My reign will be safe. My land will be free for all, Mars. They will not die in vain.”

“They already haven’t, my brother,” Mars said quietly.

“She took a blade for him,” Cass bit.

“My friend—”

“Ellie’s sister took a blade for my brother.”

“It is war.”

“It is obscene,” Cassius retorted. “For what? For what do they fight, Mars? How can you even begin to form the fucking thought that you’d take up arms to stop another from being free? Much less kill for it?”

“I cannot answer that, for I have not had that thought, Cass.”

Cassius looked to the ground and wrapped his hand around the back of his neck.

Mars took them to the urgency at hand.

“It is certain he will not recover?” he asked carefully.

Cassius dropped his hand and looked to him. “Liam says it’s impossible. He left some of his intestines and most of his lifeblood on the battleground. He could barely move his mouth to ask for the poison.”

“Then do not delay a moment longer in giving it to him.”

Cassius didn’t.

Not even to nod his head.

He turned on his boot and jogged to a line of tents set up at the base of the mountains where the wounded were being tended.

Mars ran with him.

They went through the flaps of one and were confronted with a number of lanterns turned high, a deathbed, a dead man in it, and his two friends standing vigil.

“Did you give it to him in my absence?” Cassius asked Nero.

“No, he slipped away on his own,” Nero replied.

“I should have given it to him,” Cassius muttered, looking down to Antonius. “I should have ended his pain.”