Page 61 of The Curse of Gods (The Curse of Saints #3)

Perhaps there was consolation in death.

The thought was hazy as Aya came back to herself, her body warm and…

safe. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she could feel it in her bones.

Maybe it had something to do with the familiar, melodic voice in her ear, its deep baritone softly singing a song that she had once been too afraid to admit she’d be content to listen to forever.

Aya burrowed deeper into the warmth beneath her, a soft laugh stirring something in her chest as the vibrations of it tickled her cheek where it rested on something firm.

Recognition came syrupy and slow. She knew that laugh. She missed that laugh.

Perhaps there was consolation in death. Because Will’s laugh was in her ear, soft and low and deep, and he had kept his promise; he’d found her in the Beyond after all.

“I’ve got you, Aya love,” Will murmured, and she felt the words rumble through his chest and seep into her own skin. They tugged at her consciousness, pulling her more into waking with every syllable.

I promise I’ve got you.

Aya’s eyes flew open as a gasp ripped from her throat.

The citadel. Kakos. Evie.

Evie.

Evie.

She jerked up, her hands shoving at the figure beneath her as she stumbled to her feet. Her eyes seared as she blinked against the light pouring into the room.

Light meant pain, light meant chains and an iron table and—

Aya tried to catch her bearings, her hands thrusting in front of her to keep the threat away.

They’d caught her, they’d caught her, they’d—

“Breathe, Aya,” a voice was saying. There was a hand on her wrist, her bare wrist, and, oh gods, they were going to shackle her again.

“No!” she screamed, the word cracking from her chest as she ripped her hand out of their grip. She stumbled backward with the force of it, her hip slamming hard into the corner of a table. She tried to summon her power, but she was so, so tired, and she couldn’t breathe, why couldn’t she breathe —

She flinched at the first touch of Sensainos affinity, her power curling in on itself, protecting instead of attacking. Aya hated the way a broken please fell from her lips as her shoulders hunched in a brace for pain.

She had let her guard slip just for a moment, and now she was unraveling, that stoic, cold, brokenness crumbling into something far more raw and real.

She had shown them too much, had waited and suffered too much only to ruin it all by showing her hand in that godsforsaken citadel, and now Evie would know, and—

She stumbled back another step, her hand flailing as she tried to grab something to steady her. It landed in something soft and coarse, the texture so jarring that it momentarily broke through her panic.

Fur.

Aya sucked in a breath, her chest stuttering with the movement as she looked down to see her fingers intertwined in a coat of gray. She blinked, her attention jerking back toward the guard, but…

Gray, again. Gray with flecks of green, like the river stones that sat in the shallow paths of the Loraine.

“You’re safe.”

Something wet pressed against her palm. Aya glanced down to see a wolf’s snout nudging gently against her skin. She tried for another breath, and then another, forcing air through the tightness of her lungs.

Slowly, the room came into focus.

List what you can see, mi couera.

Her bare wrists.

Her bonded.

And…

“Will,” Aya breathed.

He stood a few paces from her, his hands outstretched, as if he were soothing a wild animal. But his face was calm, and steady, and beautiful, and real —

Was he real?

Aya tried to suck in more air, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. That vise grip of panic refused to loosen its grip, her chest rising and falling in rapid succession.

He was here. He was…

“Breathe, Aya love,” he murmured, taking a hesitant step toward her.

She couldn’t. Her vision blurred with tears, her hand finding her throat as if she could will her lungs to open.

Weeks of burying her feelings, of leaning into the brokenness Evie expected to see. Weeks of terror, and pain, and coming to terms with her own death.

Coming to terms with never seeing Will again.

Weeks of grief she swallowed until all they saw was emptiness.

Emptiness, and passivity, and meekness.

Weeks and weeks, all leading up to a single moment, a single deception that could have saved the realm and stopped the war and she’d faltered .

She’d failed .

“I could have ended it,” Aya gasped, her body shuddering with the force of her sob. “I was going to end it.”

Will’s brow furrowed, one hand still outstretched between them. Still reaching, still wanting.

“What are you talking about?” he asked softly.

“I was going to steal her power. I was going to fix the veil.” The confession snagged on her staccato breaths, tears blurring Will’s features until she could hardly make him out.

“I don’t…I don’t understand…”

Aya squeezed her eyes shut as another strangled cry climbed up her throat. She wrapped her arms around herself, desperately trying to gather her shattered pieces, but there were so many , there were too many, and she couldn’t hold them, she couldn’t hold them, she couldn’t…

It’s the inside wounds that hurt the most.

She hadn’t known when she’d uttered those words to Aidon just how far those inside wounds could go. She didn’t know the way someone could rip her power from her and it would feel like losing her very essence.

She didn’t know that in doing so, her power would fight to heal her time and time again, until it rendered a tonic—imbued or otherwise—completely useless.

She didn’t know, until she did .

In their hubris, they’d assigned an Anima healer to her, never once considering an advanced Saj would more easily learn what they did not know: that Aya’s power was beginning to break through.

But then Lorna had come, and she had stared at those shackles knowingly, almost as if she could sense Aya’s power roiling inside of her, despite the way she shielded it.

Just as she’d shielded herself from Will after the Athatis attack.

Aya had wondered if soon, her power would be too strong to hide beneath the tonic and her own shield.

If soon, Evie would know, too.

So she’d made a plan. It was, after all, Lorna who had inspired it. Not just with her knowledge that Aya and Evie alone could summon the veil, but with all she had told her before:

No practitioner had reached the level of power to tear down the veil. No Visya , except Evie. Aya was not powerful enough.

Yet.

We are who we choose to be.

Aya had chosen to be exactly who Evie wanted to see.

Another broken sound fell from Aya’s lips as she doubled over, her arms wrapping tighter and tighter. She couldn’t see through the tears blurring her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from hearing the plea woven in Will’s murmured Aya .

She didn’t know how to coax the words from the labyrinth of grief inside her.

Aya had failed, and Lorna had died, and thousands more would follow because Aya had made a single desperate choice in the Talan throne room.

“I brought her back.” Aya’s voice cracked with the admission. “I summoned the veil. I brought Evie back and she—she—”

How could she explain the atrocities that Evie had committed, the betrayal that the saint—the demigod—had managed to do not just to Aya, but to the entire realm?

“She’s a demigod,” she choked out. “Pathos and Saudra are her grandparents. The gods…they killed her.”

“Evie?” Will asked, ducking his head to keep her gaze.

Aya tried to nod, but the words were tumbling out of her now, her body shaking as she held herself tighter.

“They used me to create Diaforaté,” she managed.

Just speaking of it made her muscles lock, as if she were back on that table, bracing for pain.

“They had shackles imbued with Dominic’s tonic, and they… they r-ripped my power from me, and—”

Aya sucked in a painfully sharp breath, and a muscle in Will’s jaw feathered as he bit back whatever anger was desperate to burst forth.

“I made them believe I’d help them,” she gasped. “I was going to steal her power and mend the veil.”

She had tested it on the Midlandian spy. And then she’d killed him not out of vengeance, but out of mercy, or even selfishness, because she did not want to hear his screams.

And all the while…Lorna had known. Aya knew it as surely as she knew her bonded’s howl. She’d seen it in those constant glances at her shackles. She’d heard it in the pointed way she’d asked, You will truly let them use you in this way?

Lorna had known, and when she’d seen Will, she had sacrificed herself anyway in the hopes that Aya could choose another way. Aya blinked through her tears, her vision clearing enough to track the way Will’s throat bobbed as he swallowed.

His eyes raked down her, taking in the deep navy uniform. The Kakos sigil. His face shuttered, pain rippling across his features as he shook his head.

“That…that could have killed you,” he whispered. “What if your body couldn’t handle that much power, Aya?” he pressed. “What then?”

Aya’s grief turned sharp on her tongue, a strangled sob bursting from the confines of her chest. “Then at least she would be dead !”

She would have gladly given her life to erase Evie from the realm, to undo what Aya had done in Dunmeaden out of pure desperation. Will’s eyes flashed, the hand at his side curling into a fist. He was, as ever, unrelenting.

“She would have been dead, and you right along with her.”

“What of it?”

“What of it?” Will repeated, his nostrils flaring with indignation. He took another step toward her. “What of it?! How can you even say that?”

“I am not chosen,” Aya whispered, her voice cracking over words that were broken and hollow and true . “I’m…nothing.”

For a moment, Will simply stared at her. A fractured sound tried to escape his lips, but he swallowed it down, his brow furrowing as he forced his eyes shut.

He sucked in a trembling breath.

Another.

His eyes were wet when he opened them once more.