‘Kyan!’ she sobbed, as her world was torn to pieces.
His eyes met hers through the dust and blood and spray of the Wake’s pool.
And the love in them drew that feeling tight as a noose that had suddenly snapped and freed her in the face of death.
‘I lov—’
EPILOGUE
Bells
BELLS HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT IT. SHE’D JUST TRIED TOstop the knife.
She barely felt her father’s body knocking back into hers. In that split second, face to face with all of Aífe’s fury, something fundamental rocked through her, stealing her breath, dropping her stomach.
And that thing she had always felt, that strange company she kept with death, told her what would happen next.
In a blinding moment, she Saw her father’s death as sharp as a knife to her temple. It came with the strangest sense of déjà vu. Flashes of it matching what she’d thought had only been a nightmare the night they’d stayed in Edinburgh and she’d fallen asleep beside Remi, her mind pleading with the Goddess of Fate and Madness.
And then it unfolded.
Bells knew the knife had hit its mark, because of her father’s breathless shock and the glee in Aífe’s face.
As he fell backwards, he fell onto her.
Blood – there was so much blood. She shuddered as she scrambled out from under him to check, to see—
The knife in his chest, and the blood pooling over them, making her sticky.
‘Dad,’ she breathed, hands beginning to shake.
Nicole’s inhuman scream seared her mind with horror. The screams. The screams wereso loud.
And her heart, herbeing, was unravelling right in front of her, threatening to take anything and everything that she was.
She had no words for the extreme life-threatening grief that took its place.
There was no logic to a world in which her father didn’t exist.
She stared at his face, the open eyes, so still.
So lifeless.
It hit her like a freight train. The crushing of the world. The removal of all the air. The destruction of her reality.
Her father had been killed.
Her father had beentaken—
He wasgone.She knew it, she couldfeel it.
The sob cracked her down the middle, ripped her open to some desperate kernel gleaming like a lost treasure. But she couldn’t stop it. It happened again, and again, and it was tearing her apart. The sob became a plea, a desperate child’s shriek for her protector, her last parent, her safe haven—
He had been there for every dark moment waking from visions of death, every staggered search for help. He had been the spine of their family, the stalwart protector. As long as he was there, they were safe. They would always be safe with him.
And now—
Now there were no more tears. The tears had stopped because this was—
