Page 25 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

He needs to keep talking. As long as he’s talking, he’s staying alive.

“One more truth.” His hand shakes as he reaches for my heart again, pressing his palm to my chest. “I chose heartlessness, not so that I could be cruel, but because my rage had become dangerous. I had to put it somewhere where it wouldn’t hurt another innocent fae. I wouldn’t go back if I could and choose a different way.”

He pauses. “But now… I’d give anything to feel love again.”

Tears slide down my cheeks as his fingertips feather my skin.

“You could shatter me and send me into darkness, Thyra, and I wouldn’t care as long as you were with me.” His gaze runs from my lips to my bare arm where the Dragonstone Blade is emblazoned and the ivory ribbon is marred with dark runes, then across the silver threads bound to my body and back to my face.

His smile is quiet and gentle. “No evil will break down your door and crush your throat.”

I thought my heart was already broken, but this pain is too much for me to bear.

Tears streaming down my cheeks, I press my forehead to his forehead as he continues speaking slowly, every word more aching than the last.

“When I die…I ask that you carve my name on the gravestone. But do not put it beneath my sister’s name. Tip the stone over and carve it into the side now touching the earth. That way…my family’s names will face the sky and mine will face the fields of snow.”

He falls silent and I wait for him to say more. “Stellen?”

I draw back, my fingers cold on his cheeks.

His eyes are blank and his chest is still.

No.

“Stellen!”

On his other side, Nara whimpers, her head hanging low.

A cry leaves my lips, but nothing can fill the void where Stellen’s song has fallen silent.

Chapter Seven

Thyra

My world is spinning.

I’ve lost everyone I cared about.

As the silver threads I wrapped around Stellen’s wounds float up off his body and back to mine, I try to push myself upright, only to rock on the spot, my head in my hands and cries pushing at my chest.

Ugly sobs. Angry sobs.

Somehow, my braid is caught in my fingers and with it, the yellow ribbon Stellen wound so carefully into my hair, the soft material pressing to my trembling lips.

His blood is all over my hands. All over this precious ribbon.

Blood that didn’t congeal because of me.

A heart that no longer beats…

Because of me.

Rage pushes to my lips and I can’t constrain it. I roar out my pain, screaming into the cold sunlight, but nothing can ease this hurt.

All this death. All this loss. All this sorrow.

All for what?