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I had to get away. I needed space. Time. I needed a plan. But no matter where I went, he followed. Standing too close, insisting I do the unthinkable. The stage was too small. The crowd, too loud. Every sound became an echo, a thunderstorm in my addled mind. Every move I made caused my stomach to roll until I was sure I’d be sick.
The sand.
The time.
The sadness… the devastation.
“Kill him! Kill him!”
I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe.
“You must give them what they demand, or it could be anyone up here tomorrow, and you will have no choice at all.”
“This is not a choice.”
He turned the hilt of Serenity toward me, lifted my shaking hand and forcing her into my trembling palm.
“Kill him!”
“Let me save you,” he said, stepping forward until the tip pierced that beautiful suit. “I’ve lived the better part of my one hundred years. It’s time for you to live yours.”
I tried to back away again but was met with the cool wall of the hourglass.
“Kill him!”
“Deyanira,” he said again as my ears rang.
“No. Send someone else out. I don’t care who. Go find someone else.”
“It will be me. Don’t ask me to condemn another.”
My chest tightened at his plea. He’d been everything a father should have been to me, and I hadn’t had long enough with him. Words caught in my throat as I tried to speak, a knot of grief gripping my voice.
“I love you,” he mouthed. “Do it now.”
Each breath I took felt constricted, as if my chest had been clenched in a vise. His hand rested on my hand holding the blade as I stared into his unwavering eyes. And though his fingers trembled, the smile on his face was steady. Calm. Just as he had been.
The choice was no choice at all. Take twenty years from Hollis or an immeasurable amount of lives later. It could be Paesha standing here next time, and then Thea and Elowen. Even Orin. Faces of a thousand strangers floated through my vision as I pictured the mass of people Drexel would have me kill.
“I’m ready, Little Dove.”
“Forgive me.”
Somehow, I managed to pull back and send that blade home. Right into the heart of the best man I’d ever have the pleasure of knowing.
The crowd stilled as everything halted. When Hollis gasped, my world became ensnared in that fleeting exhalation, accompanied by the macabre dance of blood that stained my hand when he gracefully crumbled upon the stage.
Locking eyes with the Maestro over the top of the roaring audience bursting to their feet, I made him a silent promise of death, just as the curtains fell.
Chapter 45
Iwould have waited for Death to come. I would have bargained and gave him whatever he asked for in exchange for that soul’s return. The soul of a kind old man in a world full of grit and grime and festered hatred. The Maestro had said Death liked to bargain, and I was desperate. But solid arms lifted me from Hollis’s still body and carried me away.
Profound sadness matched absolute fury in a battle. But I could only cry. Only hold on to the man that I’d just taken from again as Orin carried me into the Syndicate tunnel and didn’t let go, but rather fell to his knees and wept with me as he shook with sobs and mourned Hollis Bennett with all he had.
The door gave no sound as Paesha and Althaea joined us on the floor. Their sobs and sniffles were each a slice of pain and guilt upon me in that dimly lit hall. How could we mourn him? How could we ever grieve enough to feel anything beyond shattered?
“It’s not your fault,” Orin whispered into my ear, his voice hoarse, weak. “It’s not your fault.”
