She left the two of us alone by the fire.
“Are you okay?” Will asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
There was no point lying anymore. I was too tired to pretend.
“Iria will look after us. She’ll make this place feel like home for the next few days,” Will said. “She’s a kind woman. I remember staying here when I was younger. She’d always have food, cakes, and presents waiting for me. I’d get fatter every visit.” He huffed a quiet laugh. “She’ll take good care of us. We’ll rest and then be on our way.”
I followed Iria up the stairs and down the hall. Her home didn’t feel like a house. It felt like a fortress. Or a maze. The kind of place you could get lost in if you weren’t careful.
When she opened the door to the room I’d be sleeping in, I stopped in the doorway and stared.
It didn’t look real. It looked like something from someone else’s life.
A little girl’s dream room.
Delicate flowers curled along the wallpaper, and a pale canopy hung above the bed like mist. The sheets were soft, tucked neatly, all in shades of pink.
Iria had laid out a white nightgown at the edge of the bed. Too clean. Too perfect. But I put it on anyway.
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
I slipped beneath the covers, their softness washing over me like water. I let it swallow me, and for the first time in what felt like forever, the sadness and the anger were quiet. But serenity hadn’t taken their place.
What came instead was worse.
An emptiness settled so deep in my chest it felt like it had carved me out from the inside.
I stared at the floral pattern on the wallpaper until the shapes blurred into each other, and as I started to drift, I wondered if there was anything left of me at all. If the part that mattered, the part that loved and laughed and dreamed, had died along with my family. I thought maybe that’s how it should have been.
Why was I still breathing when they weren’t?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Smoke clawed at my lungs, thick and burning, and every breath cut through me.
I couldn’t scream.
Couldn’t cry.
Just breathe and hurt and breathe again.
Everything around me was screaming. The ground shook. People ran, stumbled, and fell. Some didn’t get back up.
Chaos. Real chaos. Crushing. Soul-ripping. I didn’t know where to look. Everyone was running as if there was a way out.
But there wasn’t.
We were trapped.
And I was in the middle of it. Fear heavy in my veins, weighing down every limb, like I was moving through tar. I tried to help, reached out to someone, but my hands just grasped at the air.
I couldn’t hold onto anything.
I saw a woman with her baby, flames climbing up her dress. An old man crushed under the stampede of Eredian soldiers. A boy screaming for his father, and no one hearing him.
People I knew. Faces I recognized. And I saw them fall. One by one.
