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She could sense Merrick stiffen behind her, his unnerving presence moving closer.

Her father stared at her, and she bit her cheek at the devastation in his eyes.

“I’m s-sorry. She’s… she’s dead.”

Lessia shook her head as she took a step back, shaking off his warm embrace.

That was a lie.

Her mother couldn’t be dead.

The woman with the softest hands.

The woman with the kindest smile.

The woman with the most beautiful singing voice.

No.

“She’s— No!” Lessia violently shook her head again. “She’s not old enough to die yet.”

She hadn’t been more than a few years past forty when Lessia left.

Humans could live to at least eighty. Perhaps even ninety if they were lucky.

“She was sick.” Her father’s eyes pleaded with her as she continued to back away. “I brought a healer to help your sister after… after the accident. When she was updating us on her progress, she realized almost immediately that your mother… that she was ill as well.”

Lessia’s back collided with Merrick’s chest, but she couldn’t even feel his arms around her as her father continued.

“There was nothing we could do. It’s… humans, they get diseases we don’t. She’d been so happy, it had masked its progression, but when everything happened—”

Lessia pushed Merrick off and sprinted away, her hands flying up to cover her ears.

No.

No.

No.

She repeated the word with every step she took.

Her legs didn’t take her to the cabin but toward the cliffs on the other side of the island—their darkness and lonely position mirroring the empty abyss within her.

She might not have killed Frelina.

But her mother had died because of the worry she’d brought into her life.

And…

She’d died not knowing Lessia existed.

ChapterTwenty

The moon hung high in the sky as she lifted rock after rock and hurled them onto the calm surface.

The low splashes didn’t do anything to soothe the chaos churning inside her, the feeling so suffocating she wanted nothing more than to crawl out of her skin—to become someone else…

Or perhaps become nothing at all.