Page 61 of A Promise of Lies (Shadows of the Tenebris Court #3)

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Bastian

T here was no breath in her. No pulse. No hope. No nothing.

She’d… gone.

I shook my head again and again. I could accept anything else in the world but not this. Not a world without her.

“Kat?” I smeared blood from her face. Hoping, searching, needing. “Katherine? Love?”

I whispered to her, called for her, kissed her eyelids, her lips, tasting her copper and my salt, asking the gods for some true love’s kiss miracle.

None came.

“I couldn’t stop her,” Braea said behind me.

“Shut up.” I hunched over Kat, keeping her to myself, keeping up my hunt for something to cling onto. Because if she was gone…

No. I refused it. Absolutely. Utterly.

No .

“She went after the Crown of Ashes. She tried?—”

“ Shut up !” It was a roar, as broken and raging as everything inside me. The ground shook. The trees creaked.

They had betrayed me. The source of our power. The core of our bargain with the land. And they’d betrayed me by taking her.

“She tried to enter the gauntlet,” Braea whispered, like she couldn’t speak past her grief. “I’m so sorry for your?—”

“Say another word and I will cut out your fucking tongue.”

Her shocked silence was a palpable thing, thick like the fog.

I placed Kat upon the ground. It didn’t matter that the soil was cold and damp. She was gone. Nothing mattered.

“You.” I turned to Braea, voice not my own, but something as alien and cold as the Wild Hunt’s voices. “You made her go after the Crown. You knew she thought we should retrieve it. You did this.”

From the mist, a Horror emerged—an unseelie created, shackled, and controlled by her.

A wave of rage burst from me, shadows racing out to it as I roared, “ Ivunhalem .”

When she saw the creature fall still, her face paled. “How did you do that?”

“It’s their language,” I bit out.

“But they’re monsters, they don’t have?—”

“They weren’t always monsters, though, were they?”

She flinched and shook her head. “I didn’t do it.” That was all the answer I needed. “ They chose to use the book.”

“And you knew they would. Just like you knew it would turn innocent fae into this . Just like you knew Kat would go after the Crown and die.”

I stared at her—my queen, my grandmother. And as I stared, the thing I’d worked for all these years, the thing I’d killed for, tortured for, deceived for, placed Kat in danger for broke apart, as thoroughly and irrevocably as the body at my feet.

She was nothing, and I owed her nothing.