I hugged her tight. She was shaking so hard it rattled through me. There’s nothing in life that hurts like watching your mother break—
And knowing you can’t fix it. That your arms won’t ever be enough again.
“My little boy,” she kept saying. “My boy.”
My parents were never the same after that night.
My mother started waking up screaming. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. She’d twist in the bed, her fingers knotted in the sheets, calling for Einar. My father never told me if he found Aran, or any of the other soldiers, he just came back that night with the axe dripping in blood, rinsed it off in the kitchen sink, and put it away like nothing had happened.
And he refused to speak about it.
He told us later that they’d buried the boys at the cemetery. Some of the other men had helped. Isak’s father was one of them.
That was when it hit me. I’d never see my brother again.
He was already in the ground.
My father said we could hold a wake in his memory in a few days, if my mother could bear it. But it already felt too late. Like they’d given up, like they knew the end was coming.
I didn’t just lose Einar that day.
I lost all of them.
And it didn’t matter that I was drowning too. That the grief had turned my heart into stone, every beat cracking me open again.
I had made a promise. To Jorek. To the Wardens. To myself. And I had to move, do something—anything—or I’d sink.
So I went to the bakery the next morning, shaped the dough, baked the loaves and loaded the cart with treason. The routine helped. It gave me something else to focus on, for a moment.
Then I walked to the Blood House.
I was the first one there. It was so strange, standing alone within those walls. Part of me expected the walls to whisper her name. Part of me wanted them to. Maybe they could tell me what really happened that night when Licia and her mother vanished into thin air.
The door creaked open.
Will.
He stepped inside, breathless like he’d been running.
“Kera?” he said, his voice soft. “You’re here… I didn’t think you’d come.”
He walked toward me slowly, his brows drawn together, eyes wide and unsure. That gentle, worried look he always wore like second skin.
“How are you—” he stopped himself. “That’s a dumb question. Sorry. I just—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Is there something… anything I can do?”
I opened my mouth, but the words abandoned me. Instead, tears found their way down my cheeks, uninvited, unstoppable.
Will’s face crumpled.
“No, no—Kera…” His voice cracked. “I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
His arms wrapped around me. And I folded into him. He didn’t try to hush me. Didn’t tell me to breathe. He just held me through it, through the shaking, the gasping sobs, the sound tearing out of me like something dying. Maybe it was. MaybeIwas.
The others trickled in one by one, and I put the pieces of myself back together. Not that it would help much, judging by the look on their faces when they saw me, everyone knew. There were fewer of us that day. Not thirty. Maybe twenty. If that. I spotted Eryx, and Idalie. And Vidar. Jorek stood by the table, like last time.
“Listen up,” Jorek said, voice steady. “The Eredians have taken Aran, Selma, and Nora. All three are missing. We’re presuming dead.”
He scanned the room, his gaze hard.
