“No!” Vale shouted as a reading slammed into her, and her head tipped back toward the heavens.
And Ritalia sent her dagger flying across the cavern with lethal precision and speed.
“Alabath!” Tolek warned.
Ophelia’s head snapped up, eyes locking on that blade that whistled through the air, poised to strike her heart. Not quickly enough, she tried to lunge away.
But she barely flinched before someone else was there to take the dagger in her stead.
Before that sharpened sliver of silver sank into Lyria Vincienzo’s heart, and a small gasp escaped her lips, her hands cupping the hilt against her chest.
Lyria, the Commander of the Mystique armies, our Master of Weapons and Warfare, fell to her knees, one of the very things that had given her her title thrust deep in her chest. Her eyes wide and lips forming a silento.
And Tolek?—
Tolek’s scream wrenched the air unlike anything I’d ever heard.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Tolek
“Ria!”
I dove to my knees, catching my sister as she fell forward.
“Lyria,” I begged. It was a broken sound. Not my voice. That wasn’t my voice talking, and this wasn’t my sister in my lap with a dagger in her chest.
“Lyria…Ria…” I brushed the hair that had slipped from her braid out of her face.
My hands were red.
My hands were red.
Why were they red? They shouldn’t be leaving streaks on her cheeks like that. And her eyes shouldn’t be so unfocused. That wasn’t Lyria. Lyria was a pillar. Lyria was strong. Lyria was?—
“Ria, please, please don’t.” I looked around frantically, and only then realized I was crying. Everything other than my sister’s face was blurred. “Someone help! Santorina!” My friend’s name sawed through my throat as I turned back to my sister.
A piece of me knew no one could do anything. Fate was in the flutter of Lyria’s lashes, in the weak grasp she had on my arm. In the fucking fae dagger lodged in her heart.
I grappled to hold her tighter. “Lyria please,” I sobbed. “We have to—we have to get our siblings still. We’re going to do that together.”
A warm presence wrapped an arm around me. Something I knew was supposed to be comforting but only made me realize how quickly Lyria was losing that warmth.
Because it was all spilling out over her hand, still cupped around the hilt of the dagger.
There was so much noise around us, but I couldn’t remember what any of it meant. None of it mattered, because Lyria was…my sister was…
“We didn’t have time!” I yelled. “We said this wasour time, Lyria! You can’t…you can’t…” My words became gasps.
Red. Everything was red.
It was all sticky and red. Except her face which paled with every struggling inhale. Each one sounded like they hurt. Each one ripped a hole wide in my chest.
If she had to go, I didn’t want her last memory to be painful.
“We got the time we needed,” she muttered through cracked lips. “Made amends.”
“I didn’t want fucking amends,” I growled. “I wanted the future.”
