The general was bowing to her, his scarred face slick with blood and scarabeo gore, assuring her that the soldiers could finish the cleanup without her.
She blinked, and Nina and Saida had her by the arms, guiding her down Finestra’s Peak and up the road toward the city.
Panic surged, and she fought free, turning to search for Dante.
He shouldn’t be alone. They couldn’t leave him alone.
“They’re bringing him,” Nina said, and Alessa had the strange sense that it wasn’t the first time Nina had reassured her of this. “Right behind us, see?”
Sure enough, two soldiers trailed behind them, bearing a stretcher, with Josef steadying it.
The city gates creaked open, and the first wave of cleanup crews stepped out, spears ready to gore any remaining scarabeo who skittered in the shadows. A man, followed by a woman, then more. They stared at the clear blue sky, at the rest of the landscape. Scarred and soiled as it was, Saverio still stood.
One by one, their eyes turned to her with wonder.
Alessa heard herself declare the battle over, and a cheer rose. A cry of victory she couldn’t share. Shouts of joy and relief so distant from the agony tearing her apart.
She kept her eyes forward as people moved aside to let the weary saviors pass, but she could feel Dante’s presence, or lack of it, behind her.
Anger bled into the holes left by grief. They needed to know who had saved them, and it wasn’t her.
She stopped in the middle of the crowd. “There is your savior. His name was—” She gathered herself. “His name was Gabriele Dante Lucente.”
Gabriele Dante Lucente. God-granted strength and enduring light.
She sobbed a laugh. No wonder he hadn’t told her.
“He believed he was a monster because we told him he was. He believed he could bring only darkness into the world because we told him darkness was all he had. But he was the light. And he gave everything to save you.”
He gave everything, and she’d lost him.
A small, tentative hand found Alessa’s shoulder. Nina, tears coursing down her blood-streaked face.
Then Kamaria, halting but walking.
Josef paused to bow low.
Farther down the line, a hand saluted from a stretcher. Kaleb.
Alessa had made it through a battle with not one, but many Fontes alive.
Her broken, blood-soaked army of friends.
Sometime soon, she would see her family, and she would be thankful they lived, too. Sometime soon she would remember that the world was more than one person, and one death did not erase a thousand lives saved. Someday soon she would feel as though she had done her duty. But not today.
She instructed the men bearing Dante’s stretcher to follow her into the temple.
“You have wounds, Alessa,” Nina said softly, as the soldiers placed Dante’s body on the altar. “You should come inside and let the doctors examine you.”
“She will,” Kamaria said. “Give her a minute.”
Saida beckoned Nina over. “Come on, help me get Kamaria up the stairs.”
They left, followed by the soldiers, and Alessa was alone in the darkness.
Three times she’d knelt before bodies on this altar.
This time, tears came easily, but the tears that brought him to the Cittadella in the first place and kept him there the next couldn’t bring him back.
The dank cold reached for her bones, but couldn’t chill her, because she was somewhere else. Somewhere warm, with hot sand beneath her toes, and a calloused hand in hers.
Gently, she closed his eyes. He could have been sleeping, if one slept on bare stone.
If one slept in clothing soaked with blood.
She ran her fingers over his, so cold and stiff.
Alone in the silent temple, she kneeled before the man she loved. No jeweled coffin or bed of velvet. No funeral or choir. The same in death as he’d gone through most of life—alone and forgotten.
But never by her.
Hands trembling, she cupped her palms as though in prayer, bowing her head to let the tears fall, unchecked.
Outside, people needed their savior, people injured and dying who deserved to be thanked and blessed, but she couldn’t bear to leave him alone with nothing to prove he’d been loved and cherished in life.
A gift.
She spread her fingers across his chest, her heart beating hard enough for them both.
She shouldn’t even hope.
It was impossible.
But like she’d done for Hugo the last time she kneeled on the altar, she searched the hollows inside her.
Nothing at first.
Then, a flicker.
An echo of Dante’s gift, the fragment she’d stolen—no, the part he’d given her—when he’d died.