Page 72

The mist doesn’t move.

I feel ridiculous. A grown man standing in a dead woman’s garden, talking to air.

Then it stirs.

My heart stumbles.

The shape of a face almost forms in it, familiar enough to hurt before I can tell myself I don’t care.

My mother.

Or the cruelest trick my mind has learned yet.

“Is this what you wanted?” My voice threatens to break. “To leave us gutted and alone?”

The mist refuses to speak.

The luna moth rises from the flower and drifts through the pale air between us. My mother loved these creatures. She said they were souls with no sense, always diving towards danger no matter how many times the light burned them.

My mother was chosen as Seraph, and it destroyed her. Now Zaiya stands in the same line of fire.

And I put her there.

I move closer, daring the mist to hold its shape. But the closer I get, the faster it dissolves, until there’s nothing left but cool air and the sound of my own breath.

The memory of my mother stepping off the bluff crashes through me. Her dress snapping in the wind. Her body vanishing below the edge. The awful elegance of it.

The way she didn’t look back.

I could have let Zaiya fall.

Maybe I should have.

Instead, I gave her a choice. I saw the danger and still put it in her hands. And now I know it’s going to place her in the path of every cruelty the Order holds.

Grief and rage collide in a sickening rush.

“She won’t end up like you.”

My voice sounds wrong in the garden. Too sad and desperate.

My mother chose to leave us. Chose to break the man who worshiped her. Chose to carve a wound into me.

But I’ll choose differently.

Zaiya appeared in my life and now she’s woven into every thought I have. A sacred thread. A dangerous little blade. She’s mine now. In every sense of the word.

A chill brushes my face. Light as breath. I almost let myself believe it’s my mother’s hand, reaching through the veil.

“Don’t touch me.”

The moth lifts again and taps against my cheek. I swat it aside and turn towards the house.

If she is standing on the other side of whatever afterlife claimed her, she’ll see what I do with the life she left behind.

I won’t let Zaiya fall. I won’t let her follow the same path. I’ll burn the whole Order down before I let it take her from me.

The manor is quiet when I step inside. There’s no fire burning, no lights warming the halls. Just silence settled over everything. The kind that thrums in your ears the longer you listen to it.