I can’t look. I know she has to die for what she has done and what she’s planning to do. I know it, but I can’t see it. I can’t watch Ronan kill my mother. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to feel it, that I’ll have to remember how it felt for him for the rest of our lives.
But just before he can strike, a hand grips his arm.
Adria.
I reach out with my shadows. I have no choice. I have to stop them.
My mother’s hands tighten around my throat. I have to do it now, or she’s going to kill me before I get a chance.
“Give me the dagger,” says Adria, her voice raw. “You are not that man, Ronan.”
He hesitates, reaching his shadow tendrils under my mother’s hands to give me room to take a gasping breath. He looks at me, and then at Adria, and I can feel his decision before he makes it.
He hands the dagger to Adria.
“But I am that woman,” she says, and she stabs our mother in the back.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mother collapses on top of me as Adria withdraws her blade and strikes her again and again.
Ronan pulls me out from beneath her, my hands shaking as I grip onto him, my body covered in my mother’s blood.
“She’s dead,” he says softly to Adria. “She’s gone.”
Adria crumbles to the ground, her body wracked with sobs as the knife falls from her hands. She turns Mother over, and the sight of her lifeless eyes nearly makes me faint.
How did it come to this?
I watch from a thousand miles away as Octavia hands Taran an elixir, which he gives to Seth. “What happened? Show me. Godsdammit, Taran, show me.”
“I don’t think—”
“Bring him here,” I choke out. I know it will hurt him to see, but there’s no way we can spare him from it, and I want my brother right now.
Seth heaves when he sees Mother’s body, vomiting up the elixir into a bush. “Oh, gods. Gods, Adria.”
“Stay away from me,” she says, backing up and holding out the knife. “Stay back.”
Taran helps Seth over to me, and the four of us stand arm in arm, leaning on each other as we watch Adria’s guards come up from the stairs.
“Your majesty?” calls a man in the blue cloak of her guard.
“Wait there,” she shouts, her eyes wild. “Everyone stay back.”
My head lifts towards a familiar sound from above: the flapping of wings. Quinn lowers Bitey back into the courtyard, this time with a companion.
Kira.
“Do you need help?” asks Quinn. She turns Bitey towards Adria, and he lowers on his paunches, ready to strike.
“Quinn, don’t!” shouts Ronan.
“Do it,” says Adria, dropping the knife. “Just do it.”
Quinn looks at our mother on the ground and then back to Adria, putting together what she missed. “Oh no you don’t. You don’t get the easy way out.” Bitey lowers himself to the ground, his paws curling beneath him so that she can get down on her own. Quinn pulls the cane from her back and walks over to Adria, picking up the knife from the ground and tossing it onto the roof of the palace. “Surrender, Adria. If any part of you regrets what you’ve done, surrender. Don’t be a fucking coward. Surrender and make it right.”
“This country is doomed,” says Adria. “It’s over. Don’t you see? The only chance we had was Brakkar, and I just killed the woman who gave us that hope. There is nothing left for me. For any of us.”
