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“If I cannot kill you, as you carry my blood, then perhaps the best solution is to utilize your talents. You see, war is coming.” His father walked the precarious line between sunlight and darkness, hands behind his back. “I have made countless enemies who would love nothing more than to watch me bleed out. Should that happen, hell will literally break loose.”
“I will not defend you. I will not become your slave.”
On a huff of disappointment, Lord Praecepsia came to a stop. “I had a feeling you would say that.”
The line of darkness consumed the light, until the baron looked up to see the same blackened sky looming over himself. His gaze snapped to Solomon.
The old man charged toward him.
Dread filled his chest, as he raised his hand and shot a bolt into Solomon’s heart. Not a moment later, his mentor collapsed into ash.
The darkness lifted to light again, and the baron sank to his knees.
45
FARRYN
“Save him.”
I opened my eyes. A deep, cramping ache pulsed in my stomach, and I let out a quiet moan, breathing through it.
Jericho sat alongside the bed, my hand clutched in his, my fingers pressed to his lips. What swirled in his eye took me back to the night he’d fallen to his knees while staring up at me, moments before his wings were severed. A cross between pain, sadness, and utter remorse. A look so intimately familiar, one I’d dreamed about incessantly, that my muscles twitched with the urge to reach out for him, before the flames could engulf him.
Confusion hung at the back of my mind like a black cloud while I studied him. The way he didn’t speak a word, but there was so much agony brimming in his expression.
The ache intensified, and I grunted, squirming against the cool sheets.
Pain. Screams. Blood.
On a gasp, I squeezed his hand. “The baby!” Twisting on the bed, I lifted myself enough to see there was no blood beneath me. For only a split second, a sense of relief came over me.
Only a dream. Only a horrible and cruel dream.
“Farryn.” A calm, but cold darkness in his voice embraced me like a winter’s night.
Before I could ask him what had happened, a sharp stabbing pain radiated across my abdomen, knocking the breath from my lungs.
“Shhh, just relax. Breathe.” Pressure across my stomach drew my attention to where Jericho rested his hand, as if to settle me.
Something was wrong. Very wrong. “The baby?”
When his brows pinched tighter and he shook his head, I felt a strange tingle at the back of my neck. He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm then lowered his head, looking the way one might in prayer.
The tingle intensified, branching across my skin like snow crystals, expanding outward, down my arms and to my fingertips. It reached my lungs and wrapped itself there like a tight fist.
Say something. Please!
Panic rose up into my throat as I waited for him to say the words. “Jericho? The baby …” My voice faltered, my throat thick with tears that I refused to unleash. Everything was fine. It was just a dream. “The baby is okay, right?”
Gaze still lowered from mine, he squeezed my hand and shook his head. “No, Tu’Nazhja,” his voice carried an agonized weight of despair, and the fist over my lungs clenched tighter.
Words floated on the air between us, as meaningless as the questions that swirled in my head.Why? How?I couldn’t absorb them because I didn’t believe him.
I shook my head and slid my hand from his. “No. Nope. It was a dream.”
As if confirming his words, warmth oozed from between my legs, and it was when I felt the thickness of a pad beneath my bottom that a dark void washed over me, a blackness through which I couldn’t see, or remember. But I knew somewhere on the other side of it was a weight I couldn’t bear. A pain so heavy, it would crush me if I dared to acknowledge it.
“I still feel the baby inside of me. I still feel it moving. I know the baby is there.” The rims of my eyes burned with the threat of tears, which blurred his form as I stared back at him.
