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Sorin feared looking at her but he made himself do it anyway, loathed the sight of the tear tracks on her face. “The girl?”
“Yes. But...how do I know her? How do I know this place?”
Sorin dragged his gaze from her and looked around, tried to summon up the courage to tell her.
The girl walked and although neither of them made any physical movements, they were dragged along for the journey as she moved through the night.
Sorin’s heart was flayed to pieces all over again when the girl came to a stop in front of the rubble of Adela’s cabin.
Gia had stopped breathing.
The girl began to look around the rubble and when she finally found what she sought, a ragged cry that echoed with anger and triumph rose from her young throat.
It was a box. Clutched in her arms, cradled like a small treasure, she carried it out of the wreckage of the cabin and walked to the clearing, sinking down only a few feet from where Sorin had laid Adela to rest—so close to his mother’s own resting place.
“Her name is Olga,” Gia murmured. “I remember that now.”
Sorin clenched his jaw, heart cracking.
Olga opened the box she’d placed in her lap, stopping to swipe at the tears running down her face.
“I was teaching her,” Gia murmured. Gia. Adela. He wasn’t sure it mattered in this strange dream. The voices sounded so similar...and she was no longer spoke in English. It was Romanian, but in a dialect hundreds of years old, one that had faded from the face of the world centuries earlier. “I didn’t plan to have children. My mother’s blood, the magic in it, it was strong. I’d have a daughter, and I’d have to train her. The people here, they needed a protector but I hated condemning any child of mine to stay here without having a choice. Olga was an orphan. She wasn’t one of the line, but she had magic in the blood. She wanted to learn. I thought maybe...”
The words faded. He thought she’d finished speaking.
Olga pulled a knife out and held it up, angling it so the old blade caught the moon’s brilliant light. Gia’s soft gasp tore another runnel into Sorin’s heart. He recognized the blade, too. It was the one he’d stolen from her.
He was somewhat surprised at the sight of the second one, though, kept tucked away in the box that was clearly meant to hold items Adela had wanted kept safe.
The beautiful one he’d secreted away from a ruler in India had been hidden in Adela’s box of treasures, along with the blade from her mother.
She should have thrown that wretched gift into the nearby gorge.
“I was a fool,” Gia murmured. “My people suffered and died. Alone.”
“Not because of you,” Sorin said. He wouldn’t have to explain after all, would he? She remembered. All of it.
Gia laughed, the sound full of scorn and anger.
He flinched as it echoed around him before coming back, louder and full of a woman’s wrath as it slammed into him.
No. This was no mere dream—and it wasn’t his dream at all.
It was Gia’s. Adela’s.
Her dream, and his penance.
