Page 63 of The Curse of Gods (The Curse of Saints #3)

Leaving Aya even for a moment was agonizing. But Will needed water to wash away the blood and dust, and he was under no illusions that she was ready to face everyone just yet.

“So if that was Evie who fell over the wall, who did she take with her?” Liam was asking as Will stepped into the living room.

“Whoever it was, she’s long dead,” Dauphine murmured gravely from where she was sprawled on the couch. “No one but a demigod could survive that.”

Liam’s mouth pinched in grim agreement, but he turned his attention to Will. “Is Aya okay?”

“She’s”—his words died on his tongue as he realized he had no idea how to answer—“managing.” He glanced at where Cole sat by the fire with a bucket. “Is that water?”

He nodded and gestured for Will to take it. “Freshly boiled.”

Will had almost made it back out of the room before he stopped, his eyes narrowing as he took them all in again. “Where’s Aidon?”

“Outside,” Dauphine answered.

Will cocked his head in question at Liam. “The Bellare staged a coup,” the Persi informed him. “Josie is safe, but his parents are missing.”

“Godsdammit,” Will swore. He felt rubbed raw in the worst of ways, an open wound that just kept hurting and hurting with no healing in sight. Every time Hope tried to take hold, Despair was there to strangle it dead.

He cut a glance at the door, but Dauphine let out a long breath as she pushed herself into a sitting position. “Leave him be,” the mercenary ordered. “He needs time to cool off.”

Liam dipped his chin in rare agreement before nodding toward the staircase—a silent understanding that Will had other priorities for now.

Will returned to the bedroom to find Aya sitting on the edge of the mattress with Tyr stretched out beside her, his head in her lap.

“I’m sure you have questions,” he began as he closed the door behind him. He set the bucket of water on the floor and strode to the armoire where Liam had found a few abandoned shirts, plucking a threadbare cotton one from the back of the shelf.

It wasn’t a washcloth, but it would do. He’d already used one to wipe the worst of the dirt from her face as she’d slept.

“How many of the wolves survived?” Aya asked as he stopped before her.

“Liam saved all of them,” Will answered. He knelt between her feet and reached wordlessly for one of her hands. “I don’t know how many survived the Battle of Dunmeaden.”

She squeezed his hand, drawing his gaze to her face. “Akeeta?” she asked.

“Downstairs,” Will assured her. “With Azul, and Liam, and Aidon, and Josie’s friend Cole, and Dauphine Adair.”

Aya raised a brow at the last name, and Will huffed a laugh. He scrubbed at the dirt marring her skin, frowning as he took in the blood mixed in with it. “I needed a team to help me infiltrate Kakos.”

“That would have been a foolish risk to take,” Aya murmured.

“No risk is foolish when it comes to you.” Aya’s fingers twitched in his hold, but Will kept up his steady strokes, scrubbing until he could make out her pale skin beneath.

“Hyacinth has taken the throne,” he informed her.

“She intends to try the remaining members of the Dyminara, if she hasn’t already.

Liam estimated about thirty survived the fire.

” Thirty who either hadn’t succumbed to Gianna’s Diaforaté or hadn’t been influenced at all.

Thirty who fought and bled beside him as they tried to save their city.

Thirty who would likely die at Hyacinth’s hand in the name of justice misplaced.

He continued to rattle off what he knew, his voice steady as he started to work on her other hand. Aya remained silent throughout it all, but he could feel her careful attention as he worked. She drank in his words with a hungry focus that spoke to months of being kept in the dark.

He hesitated only once—when he got to the news of her father. But Aya had looked past him, a vacant expression clouding her face as she simply said, “I already know.”

There’d been a finality in her words, a clear sign to back off. So he did.

He knew it would take time for her to share her own recounting of the last two months.

He would not be the one to push her, not after all she had endured.

Perhaps that’s why he was surprised that when Aya finally did speak, it wasn’t to respond to what he’d told her, but to share information of her own.

“I am the only other person who can open the veil.”

Will stilled, his makeshift washcloth still pressed against her sharp cheekbone. She’d lost the fullness of her face in captivity. It emphasized the bruised skin beneath her eyes, just as it had all those months ago in Trahir.

How many more times would he wipe the blood from her skin? How many more times would he stare into her exhausted eyes, thrown into sharp relief by the gauntness of her face?

“Who told you that?” he asked.

Aya blinked, something akin to guilt settling in the depths of her irises. “Your mother.”

Will’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What? When?” He did not have a perfect memory, especially when it came to the interactions with Lorna.

He tried to bury them deep enough to mute the bitter sting of abandonment.

But the day he brought Aya to her was crystal clear, sharpened by the desperation that drove him to seek Lorna’s help in the first place.

They spoke with her about the veil, but Lorna said nothing of Aya being the only other person capable of opening it.

Aya’s eyes darted across his face, her lips moving soundlessly as she tried to find her words. She frowned, and Will dropped the washcloth to cup her cheek instead.

“Aya,” he soothed, his thumb skimming across the arc of her cheek. Gods, he could feel the bone right there. “What is it?”

Her throat bobbed, her voice coming out cracked and confused. “The Vaguer brought her to Kakos with them,” she said, her frown deepening as if she were trying to sort truth from lie. “You…you didn’t see her on the wall in Sitya?”

Will cocked his head, another question rising to his lips, but it died in his throat as something horrible dawned on him.

If that was Evie who fell over the wall, then who did she take with her?

“The woman who went over the ledge,” he breathed, his heart slamming against his rib cage. “It was my mother.”

Aya’s chin quivered. “I-I thought you saw her,” she whispered. “I am so sorry.”

Will swallowed hard, his gaze dropping to the ground as he tried to make sense of what she’d told him.

Lorna was dead. His mother was dead .

Why?

He wondered if he’d accidentally asked the question aloud.

He wasn’t sure with the way his thoughts collided in his mind, each yelling to be heard.

But Aya was pulling his hand away from her face and cupping it between her own as she said, “I think she knew the entire time what I had planned to do to Evie and the veil.” Her lips pressed into a thin line as she tried to compose herself, her eyes lined with tears she refused to let fall, as if his grief was more important than hers.

Am I grieving?

He didn’t know. He felt nothing when he thought of how he had no certainty his father had survived the attack on Dunmeaden. But this…

This snagged in his chest in a war of emotions he could not identify despite a lifetime of feeling everyone else’s and his own.

“When I saw you…I froze,” Aya confessed, her grip tightening on his hand. “I’m sure Evie realized then that I had tricked them all. Lorna bought me time to run. She jumped over the wall, and she brought Evie with her.”

Lorna was dead. Lorna had died, and the demigod…

“They think Evie survived,” Will muttered. “I heard them talking about it downstairs.”

Aya ducked her head, staring hard at their clasped hands. “I had a feeling she would not be killed so easily.”

Lorna must have known the same. She was dead, and she had died knowing she would not kill a demigod, but instead give the woman he loved another choice.

She saw Aya’s path, and she gave her life to give her another route.

Why?

How many years had he longed for her to show him she cared? How many nights had he dreamt of a mother who would love him enough to fight for him? How many days had he wrestled with the guilt of hating a mother he thought was dead but longing for her all the same?

And now she was gone—truly gone—and he didn’t know how to feel.

Longing, guilt, hatred, anger, gratitude, regret, grief…

there was a maelstrom of emotions inside of him.

It must have shown on his face, because Aya pressed their foreheads together, her hand sliding into the strands of hair at the back of his head and tugging just enough to ground him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Will’s inhale snagged in his chest, but he forced it down with those raging emotions until he could focus on one. “She saved you. For that, I’m grateful.”

All the rest, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t have it in him to sort through it now.

Aya pulled back slightly, her eyes roving across his face. They were piercing, even with the haunted film that muted the usual brightness of the blue. Will let her look, let her read him in a way that no power could liken to.

She’d become a scholar in the study of him, so it came as no surprise when she slid her hand to his shoulder and changed the subject as he so desperately hoped she would.

“Aidon didn’t return home.”

It wasn’t a question, but Will nodded all the same. “You cannot possibly be surprised that he would also tear apart this realm to find you. Even if he hadn’t displayed his power in Dunmeaden, I don’t think anyone could have dragged him back to Trahir until we knew you were safe.”

It was a different sort of love. Will knew that now. Different, but no less important.

He picked up the washcloth and resumed his gentle ministrations across her skin. Having something else to focus on made it no easier to tell her what he had uncovered downstairs.

“The Bellare staged a coup in his absence. Josie is safe, but Zuri and Enzo are missing. It’s why Cole was in Sitya—he’d come to find Aidon.”

Aya’s muscles tensed beneath his fingers. She closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them, exhaustion seemed to weigh even more heavily on her.

“They assigned me an Anima guard,” Aya murmured. “When I saw Cole…well, I… persuaded her to free the prisoners and set fire to the camp this morning.” Her lips pinched, as if she knew it wasn’t truly persuasion she had wielded, but something more.

It wasn’t the first time she had broken through someone’s shield and compelled them instead of persuaded them. Will knew that better than anyone.

He couldn’t help the laugh that rasped out of him. Seven hells, he loved her more than he had and ever would love anything in this godsforsaken realm. He cupped her face in his hands, his lips finding hers as effortlessly as the stars found the night sky.

“You are divine,” he whispered into the scant space between them, his voice thick with emotion.

But Aya’s mouth trembled. “I wish I could have done more.”

Will’s stomach churned at the quiet admission, an echo of her panicked cries rising to his mind.

I could have ended it.

His jaw locked as Desperation attempted to rear its head.

You will not sacrifice yourself for this war.

He’d yelled those words once, with fear and love and devastation tangled up in his chest. They’d ripped from him, less command than desperate plea.

He wanted to shout them again. To mean them.

“You are not in this alone,” he said, tipping her head back so she could see the fierceness of his words in his gaze.

“I know,” Aya breathed.

Did she? He had promised her he would go over the edge with her, but he could only do that if she allowed him to fall, too.

“Promise me,” Will pleaded. “Promise me that you will let me help you.”

He did not care about prophecies, or powers, or fates, or gods. The gods be damned. All he cared about was her.

“Promise me,” he repeated.

Aya held his gaze for a long moment, her throat bobbing before she nodded.

“I promise.”