Page 145 of Lana Pecherczyk

Or did you just forget?

“He wrote this after she died,” River whispered. “No mention of me. No mention of what he did to me. It’s almost like … he feels nothing.”

“You might be right.”

Something in her tone lifted his gaze. Blake pointed to a final set of posters on the wall—nuclear warhead schematics. River recognized them because Violet and Silver had briefed the Twelve on what to look for, what they needed to find before Nero did, and what they’d hoped the cryptex would lead to.

No more crazed words. No more wobbly lines.

Everything in this section was clean, premeditated. Planned. Different maps were marked with potential detonation locations. One had obsessive calculations about blast radii. A time and date. Another map circled the secret location of this year’s Shadow Market. The distance between the Collector’s known trove and a second location with a question mark. A circle around the words cryptex and codes.

And finally, the madness itself bled onto the paper.

Cloud’s recent handwriting?—

There’s nothing left to hate.

Nothing left to love.

Nothing left at all.

I let her go.

Chapter

Forty-Five

Blake stared at the writing on the wall with a dawning sense of dread. Cloud’s final words, the maps, the plans. The heartache. The confusion. The guilt. The bitterness. The emptiness.

There was nothing left for him, so why not burn it all down?

She locked eyes with River, and his emotions flooded through their bond. One stood out more than the rest, the same one he couldn’t shake during his sleep: fear. No, more than that—terror.

“Hun, are you okay?” she asked.

He fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands. Broken wings splayed behind him, brushing the dirt, feathers molting. Crooked jacket. Haphazard shirt. Broad shoulders hitched as he fought for control, trying to barricade the emotion, to put that block back up.

She sensed his struggle as if it were her own, but the dam had already cracked.

Here kneeled her warrior, a creature who’d lived ten lifetimes to her one. With his whip-fast banter and endless confidence, River never lacked a quip. He projected indifference, but the fresh scars mapping his skin, the wobbly tattoo she’d made onhis chest, and these bottled emotions proved otherwise. The mementos he’d kept in his old bedroom. The way he held her hair back when she was sick. He cared too deeply in a world where love bowed to strategic matches and was killed by the enemy, where love became an obsession and ended in madness.

I don’t want to be left in darkness. I don’t want to end up like him.

Panic squeezed her heart. What should she do?

When her feelings overwhelmed her, she usually retreated to the solace of social media. Everything seemed so much safer with a screen separating her from reality.

But River was different. He’d encouraged her to release her pain, cracked jokes until she smiled, and showed her how to channel anger into strength. A joke wouldn’t heal him now, and neither would stabbing practice, but maybe that wasn’t the point.

She glanced around at the heartbreaking madness, an obsession born from love. Or maybe it was the other way around. Fragments of Cloud’s story still puzzled her, even with the evidence surrounding them. But it was clear these three crow boys had a special bond. And it was breaking.

Blake sank to her knees and gripped his thighs. “I’m here.”

He yanked her roughly onto his lap, crushing her against his chest.

Then, her blue-winged warrior buried his face in her neck and confessed everything. The agonized story rushed from him in desperate bursts. He spoke of his childhood friendship with Cloud, of the jealousy poisoning him when his best friend fell in love. Guilt saturated every word. Guilt for thinking Cloud had eloped. Guilt for abandoning the search when he never returned, for delaying the triad tattoo, for misinterpreting Cloud’s cry for help about the messiness of love. Cloud had spent his life trying to prove himself to his family, especially his older brothers andfather. River had been his ally, his friend, his co-conspirator. But in the end, River had become exactly the kind of selfish bastard he despised. He’d tried to dictate how Cloud should live.

His voice cracked as he described that day at the river, the day they jumped with no wings.