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1
MISHA
The driveway is a crater. Smoke hangs in the air, a deadly haze. The car—what’s left of it, anyway—litters the grass and the cracking concrete.
I scan the scene for Paige. For any sign of her, any piece of her. Even as my mind begs me not to.
I’ve seen too many people I love die already. I don’t want to see another.
But I can’t stop looking.
“What happens when we die?”I asked my brother once. When I was a kid, I thought he knew everything. That thought never really went away.
“We’re buried and our bodies decompose,”he told me bluntly.
“What about the rest of us? We have to go somewhere.”
Maksim smiled.“I believe every person gets to decide what happens to them after they die. Take me, for example. I’m going to become a comet and shoot from universe to universe.”
I glance up at the sky. It’s a persistent, eye-watering blue despite the wreckage in front of me. Is Paige up there now? Is Maksim?
“No,” I say aloud. “No fucking way.”
People are milling around in the entryway and the kitchen. My men, alerted by the chaos, are now standing useless on the periphery.
Because there was nothing they could do. She’s gone.
“Konstantin!”
If she’s gone, I don’t want to hear it from some soldier. I don’t even look at them, worried I’ll see the answer in their faces.
“He’s in the atrium,” someone says to me.
I shift in that direction, preparing myself for the worst. I heard the explosion on the phone, but it was still bigger than I thought. If Paige was in the drive like Rose said on the phone, she was definitely within the blast radius.
Bile rises in my throat. My palms are sweating and my knees are shaking. I’ve never felt so sick in my entire life. The only rival is the moment I watched the light fade from my brother’s eyes.
This can’t be happening again.
Paige.
Our unborn children.
My future.
All gone in an instant, a breath. They aren’t comets, no matter what Maksim said. They can’t be. A comet is a physical thing. An object that exists in the world. Wherever people go when they die, it’s beyond anything even I can manipulate.
That’s what makes it so terrible.
Then I hear it.
Sobbing.
I slide around the corner into the atrium and freeze.
Paige is sitting on the sofa. She’s coated in ash and dust, and more of the same stuff hangs in a dense cloud around her, like she was a mistake in a drawing that someone tried to smudge away.
But they failed.
