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I tried to draw into myself. Attempted in vain to convince my body to be calm as I cried broken sobs and grasped at the version of him I knew. Not this man that left me to drown in confusion and lies.

“She looks just like my Christabel. We have similar tastes, it seems.” Molochai violated me with his languid stare.

I flinched when his lip curled over his teeth in a snarl that I had seen before.

Before, it had belonged to Gavin. Bile slithered into my throat at the uncanny resemblance.

How I hadn’t noticed before… the snarl. The smile.

The eyes . “Ary.” Molochai cocked his head at me, tsked three times, and flashed a wicked grin.

“Did he not tell you who he was? Did he not tell you he killed Phillip Gold and your little Oliver?”

My stomach churned something horrible.

“Yes,” hissed Molochai, grinning at me as he watched me fall apart. “The Butcher of Nyrida. A son so loyal, he’s done my bidding for four hundred years.”

“I’m not loyal to you.” Gavin’s words were frigid.

“You wound me, boy,” Molochai mocked, turning sideways to reveal the rough, warm face I’d sought as a source of constant strength had been reduced to a sickly pale, like marble stone, with eyes damp from tears.

A shell of man. “I would like to know how you convinced her to give herself up for you ,” said the dark sorcerer.

“When your little rat of a friend—Morton, was his name?—came to me with news of your wife as a bargaining chip, I was simply offended you’d never shared such wonderful news of your nuptials with your own father.

You should have told me why you made a deal with me that day.

I would have helped you find your wife.”

I looked back and forth between them. Gavin’s eyes were trained on me in a silent plea. He gave me a head shake so subtle I couldn’t be sure I’d seen it, but I couldn’t process… all I could hear when I looked at him was…

“He killed… your little Oliver.”

When I’d mentioned the Butcher, he’d gone so pale…

And his knife. That truth had stared me in the gods-damned face.

How incredibly stupid I’d been.

“Shocking, I know.” Molochai cocked his head and flashed me a devilish smile. “Are you a little too trusting, Ary?”

“Ella,” Gavin pleaded. My name was all he had to say, no defense or denial. He tried to lunge for me, but Molochai trapped him in a prison of shadows. Even with his brute strength and size, he couldn’t escape it.

“You’ve been working for him,” I wept. “You’re on his side?”

“I’m on your side!” he shouted, scouring my face with his gaze. As if he needed to memorize it. “Since the moment I first saw you, I’ve been on your side!”

“Then tell me it’s not true! Tell me you didn’t kill Oliver.”

But in his eyes, there was no denial, just regret.

All I had left was a low, distressed wail as I seethed, “I hate you!”

Molochai’s laughter roared. This was nothing more than a show for him—my life and my heart, breaking.

“Good! Hate me! Fight for yourself!” Gavin reached for me again, futile against Molochai’s power. “You can, Aryella! You can fight him!”

Molochai’s laughter abruptly ceased when a gust of wind blew my hair off my shoulders. The left side of my chest caught his attention. He tore Gavin’s shirt away, leaving the full scar over my heart visible, along with my naked breasts.

Molochai’s tan skin paled. Darkness rolled around him in waves, now wild and uncontrolled. He looked at my face, back to the scar, then back at me. Shock snapped into place. He froze.

And in his eyes, there was suddenly… fear.

“You,” Molochai whispered, running his fingers along the scar over my heart, “aren’t Simeon’s daughter.”

Behind Molochai, Gavin bowed his head. When he lifted it, his soothing warmth and any remaining traces of hope were gone.

Molochai shuddered, wrapping his cold, taloned hand around my throat.

“You filthy little mutt !” He squeezed. Rage and darkness devoured his guile.

Panic bled out of him through trembling, angry breaths and wild eyes.

“And you knew!” He glared at Gavin, betrayal threading through his terror.

“Simeon kept her hidden away all this time, and you knew her—and loved her—and she —” He laughed in wild disbelief, pointing his other set of taloned fingers at Gavin.

“ She is why you came to me, so desperate.” Shadows shrouded Molochai’s eyes in deep onyx.

“She is your wife .” He stared at the scar above my heart.

“Of course, you don’t remember the day I gave you that scar , ” he snarled.

“You were only three days old, after all.”

Gavin strained against the ropes of darkness confining him. Roaring, snarling—the sounds of a rabid animal. And behind him were the sneers of Insidions as they gathered to watch our suffering.

Molochai’s laugh was loose and maniacal.

“Such a sad thing, your little wife. Angelically beautiful, yes, outside and in. I felt for myself.” He arched an eyebrow and wiggled his taloned fingers, still caked in my blood from the places he’d sliced me open.

“But weak , whiny… such a petulant child !” Molochai dug his claws into my skin and spat in my face.

“It took a little longer than I’d hoped, but you and Simeon led her right to me. ”

“Take me !” Gavin shouted desperately. “Take my life, my soul, but not her!”

Molochai scoffed. “You’d wait so long for her, you’d suffer so terribly, just to have her for what? Weeks? Days?”

“Yes.” Those deep-brown eyes, rimmed with tears, gripped me. Held me. Promised me.

Molochai bared his teeth. “Is she really worth throwing away your long, miserable existence?”

“Yes.” A tear rolled down Gavin’s cheek. “Always.”

“Special indeed.” Molochai brushed his knuckle against my cheek.

“Sheer, untapped power. I would have him kill you. Punishment, for keeping you from me.” Molochai’s thin, red lips curved into a menacing grin.

“But I would prefer to do the honors myself.” He revealed a long, jagged blade—a weapon surely forged in Hell—from a sheath at his side. “Since you escaped it the first time.”

The first time? Confusion whirled through me like my enemy’s dissonant shadows.

“Ella!” Gavin roared. “Fight!”

Molochai tsked and shook his head. “It seems, my son, that you and I have managed to steal the fight right out of her.” He thrust his hand forward with sharp, lethal speed.

The dagger in my hip felt like burning hot coals in my side. Molochai’s blade, right into my days’ old wound, ripped a bloodcurdling scream from my throat.

Gavin roared, a wild and desperate remonstrance that brought a sinister grin to Molochai’s face. Veins threatened to burst out of his skin as Gavin fought to move. But he was paralyzed where he stood. Held back by shadows.

Molochai twisted the knife above my navel before slicing upwards into the flesh of my ribs, so slowly, I felt everything. My scream faded into a broken, weakening cry .

“ No! ” roared the man I loved and hated, again…

and again… and again. Each agonized shout was a curved blade scraping out remnants of an open wound he had put there.

Veins threatened to burst through his skin, the flex of his arms was deadly, his muscles tearing, as he vainly fought against shadows to get to me.

But I realized there was nothing—truly nothing—he could do against Molochai.

Which meant I was going to die.

I’d known this, though. I had understood the risk, offering myself up. Me for his wife. That was the deal I’d accepted.

“Fight him, Ella!”

Out of an instinctual compulsion to obey him, I began to reach for the temple, for my wheel of power, but then… I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

The Queen of Nyrida had plenty to live for—a noble betrothed, devoted friends, thousands of people to worship at her feet, a war destined to be won in glorious victory.

The power to heal, move the land, the oceans, the fire simmering in the earth’s core and the very air she breathed.

But when I tried to summon something— anything —to save myself, nothing came.

I wasn’t sure if any of those things were mine. Not really. Not when I couldn’t even make sense of who I was.

I stared at the cold ground, empty and lost. Eyes wet with tears. Wondering if the never-ending silence to level all these voices might be a relief. I prayed for calm, for Nyxar, for any of the gods to end it. I’d rather be dead than live without knowing myself.

But Gavin called my name, and something stirred in my chest—a distant memory, not my own.

An invisible string stretched out of me and latched onto him, refusing to be severed.

It was… familiar, as if, even before he saved me from the wolf in that barn, it had lived within me, reaching for him.

Only just now had I let it break, cleaved in two by my doubts .

“Eyes on me!” Gavin demanded.

The invisible string grew taut, doubly strong. It heard his command. The connection dutifully obeyed, and so did I.

“Good girl, that’s my girl.” The violent trembles and suffocating tears wracked my body, but Gavin held his gaze. “I love you!” He gritted his teeth through the fractured despair in his voice and became a stone pillar of strength. “And I’m going to follow you!”

The sharp tip of Molochai’s silver blade punctured my stomach. Whimpering screams tore through me, and he shouted over my agony, over his own voice breaking.

“I swear on every star, every sky, every soul that has passed through this world, I will follow you! I will find you! Whatever it takes.”

Those three words were all it took. And I was suddenly somewhere else.

“Whatever it takes.”

It was odd, considering he’d said those three words before, and though they had made an imprint on my heart, they had never taken me… elsewhere .

This time, I watched fragments of a foreign life reel across my memory, unfamiliar images taunting me with things that never were and never could be mine.

Gavin with his hair shorter, face clean-shaven, younger, unbearably handsome, carefree, scarless, and full of hope.

A small, cozy loft above a blacksmith’s shop.

A secluded field showered in sweet, summer rain.

A small gray cat rubbing against my ankle.

A silver ring on my finger. A metal blue jay on a string.

A promise to never let me carry the weight of the world alone.

The images disappeared as quickly as they’d come, torn from me while Molochai’s jagged blade sliced into my chest. Such terrible pain was so bright I couldn’t see or taste or hear.

I screamed until there was no sound left. At some point, the shock took over. I briefly tasted and felt the coppery warmth in my mouth, but my senses began to dull shortly after.

My vision blurred. The scene… fading… in and… out… and… Molochai’s voice… a sinister whisper.

“Your heart can’t heal if it’s gone.”

He reached into my chest, and he tore out my heart.

My body was thrust through the air, swiftly and violently. I was launched backwards, up, away from them both.

And all I could hear—somehow, even after my heart left my body—was Gavin’s agonized roar, fading in front of me, above me, then completely away. From another world.

Until my gutted body was plastered on the hard rock below.

***

Shattering was not an agony I’d expected to know. Not shattered in a figurative sense. Not soul-shattered, or with a shattered heart, but physically splintered from head to toe, composed of bloody fragments. A broken shell.

And I thought if I broke every single bone in my body, the shock would become overwhelming. A sadistic form of sweet relief preceding death’s consuming kiss.

But as I laid there at the foot of the cliff, I realized I’d been wrong.

I felt it all, every agonizing wheeze as my body worked by some divine will to keep me alive.

I wasn’t sure how far I’d fallen, but I’d suffered a jagged blade through my organs, the remains of which were probably dropping out of me by now.

And my heart… was gone. No pulse pounded or even fluttered in my ears.

It was impossible that I was alive, but it seemed the gods had one more cruel thing in store for me.

Hearing him weep .

The scarred hands I had come to know slid underneath my body, and I heard his voice.

“Ella!” he wept, lips against my forehead. He began to murmur something under his breath, something that sounded foreign—a prayer—and he didn’t stop for… I don’t know how long. I had one foot in consciousness and the other in death. Time didn’t exist.

His trembling voice was so faint, a whisper. Or perhaps it was the angels, the gods, my ancestors calling me to my new home.

“I love you! Come back to me, please !” Gavin shouted desperately, finally giving up on whatever peculiar phrase he’d been repeating, until all he could cry was, “Ella, my Ella, my Ella, my love, my Ella…”

Just let me die, I thought, because I couldn’t speak. Just let me go.

Gavin didn’t say anything else. He wailed. He roared. It was a horrific sound, like fragments of his soul reluctantly splintering out of the only home they’d known.

It was all I heard.

The world around me went dark.

And I was dead.