“Don’t,” he said, his voice rough. “Don’t look.”
I shoved against him with all my force, straining to look over his shoulder. He held me tighter and forced me away from the door.
“Don’t go in there,” he pleaded with terrible softness. “I’m begging you not to look.”
I finally stared up at him. His eyes were so filled with shadows they were nearly black, and the skin under his scar was angry and red like a fresh welt. His dark brows were drawn painfully tight, deep lines creasing his face with visceral anguish.
This face had revealed so many guarded emotions these past weeks. Frustration, amusement, pride, worry, affection. Maybe even something deeper.
It was the face I had come to look for in every crowd. Even when we were cross, it was his face that calmed me every time I spun out of control.
But today, his face spoke only of despair. Relentless, unfixable despair.
“Move,” I breathed.
Heartbreak slashed across his features. His shoulders sank, his hands dropped to his sides, and he stepped away.
At first, all I saw was blood.
Blood everywhere.
Pooled on the floor. Streaked across overturned furniture. Dripping from the drapery and the cabinets.
And then I saw the writing. Large, angry letters smeared in dark crimson on every wall.
Mortal lover.
Half-breed.
Rebel scum.
“Where is he?” I scanned the room, but everything was camouflaged under a blanket of wet, shimmering scarlet. “Where is my father?”
Luther set a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Diem. It’s too late.”
No.
“Where. Is. He?” I ground out, my fists clenching tight. “Where is my f—”
Then I saw him.
In the kitchen.
The last place I’d stood with him in this home. Where I’d screamed at him, insulted him, broken his heart. Where I’d told him he wasn’t my father, then left and never came back.
There he lay, in a lake of red, his body so terribly, impossibly still.
Dead.
My father was dead.
My father, who had taken me in when I was no one to him but someone else’s bastard child, and who had cherished me as the most precious jewel in his life.
My father, who taught me everything he knew. Who never saw me as weak because I was a girl, who taught me to embrace it as my strength.
My father, who had loved me unconditionally, even when I hadn’t deserved it.
Andrei Bellator, war hero, legendary Emarion Army Commander, Advisor to the Crown of Lumnos, beloved husband of Auralie, devoted father of Diem and Teller, was dead.
A broken sob tore from my chest, a scream that was inhuman in its agony. Outside, Sorae roared into the sky, my grief consuming me so fully that it spilled across our bond and exploded into her. The house rattled with the force of our combined cries.
I staggered forward and crumpled to my knees at his side. His beautiful caramel-brown eyes were open and glassy. His mouth gaped in a permanent scream, his face forever frozen in a mask of disbelief.
I had never wanted to turn my healer’s mind off more than in this moment, but my training seized control against my will, cataloguing each injury.
His face was bruised, his lip and eyebrow split open, tissue under his nails, all suggesting a struggle. His throat had been slit, likely the wound that killed him. Puncture wounds littered his body, many of them bloodless, suggesting the murderer had continued to stab him long after his heart stopped beating.
Not just a murder—a punishment.
A message.
For me.
The murder weapon was still lodged in his chest, its handle sticking straight up into the air. Between my trembling hands and the thick, syrupy blood coating my palms, I could barely pull it free.
It wobbled in my watery vision under the thunderstorm of tears I feared would never stop falling.
Even when they dried up, they would still be falling. Until my last breath, until I crossed into the afterworld and back into his open arms, they would forever be falling.
Luther knelt at my side. The sudden awareness of him broke through my fog. My eyes cleared for a moment, and I leaned in closer to examine the blade.
If the dark, smoky grey of Fortosian steel hadn’t marked it as a Descended weapon, the jewel-encrusted handle would have. The blackwood hilt was inlaid with copper scrollwork and pale pink gemstones that twinkled as the dagger quivered in my palms.
A violent, poisonous darkness infected my veins. I had once believed that, as a healer, I could never take a life. That seemed laughable now. Once I found the person responsible, I would do so much more than simply take their life.
I would make them suffer in cruel, unimaginable ways. Make them beg me for mercy, and then make them beg me for death. I would make real every terror that haunted them, and when there was nothing left of them to wound, I would put them back together so I could do it all over again.
Devourer of Crowns. Ravager of Realms. Herald of Vengeance.
Fight.
“Yes,” I whispered in response to the voice’s savage cry. “I will.”
I clutched the blade to my chest in a vow of retribution. A promise to my father—and to the dead man walking who had stolen this precious star from my sky.
Fight.
“You should go,” I murmured to Luther.
His hand gently stroked my back. “I’m not leaving you.”
Fight.
“Go, Luther,” I said, louder this time.
“No. I won’t let you be alone.”
My skin began to shimmer, then glow, then blaze a glittering white-hot. Dark shadows spilled from my palms and curled around me like a rolling fog, staining the blood on the ground until I knelt in a sea of ink. Deep in my soul, a churning ball of ice and heat doubled in size with every shuddering breath.
I was a bomb about to explode, ready to annihilate the world with the jagged shrapnel of my grief.
Fight.
“Go, Luther,” I gritted out. “I’m ordering you to leave.”
“I will not abandon you when you need me,” he growled.
“Sorae, take him.”
“No, Diem, wait—”
The doorway shattered into a cloud of dust and splintered wood. Sorae’s talons tore away at the walls until the front facade of the house was gone, exposed to the dusky glow of the twilight sky.
Luther yelled at her to stop, but my command was clear, and Sorae was loyal only to me. She snared Luther into her talons and shot into the sky.
“Protect them,” I said. Across the bond, I felt Sorae’s heart, bleeding for me, thump in answer: I will.
I took my father’s hand. The cold stiffness of death had already set in.
It was a gut-punch of awareness that I would never again feel the warmth of his hand on my arm or the scratch of his beard against my cheeks. I would never again experience the tender strength of his arms as he wrapped me into a hug.
He was gone.
My beloved, cherished father was gone.
Because of me.
Fight.
Kill.
Destroy.
So I surrendered to my grief, and to the voice.
And I detonated.
Raw, silvery power blasted around me in an expanding sphere that was at once hot and cold, dark and light, life and death. It hissed with a deafening hum of energy that sounded and felt ancient.
It obliterated everything it touched. My father’s body—gone. The blood on the floor—simmered, then boiled, then evaporated. The Corbois medallion around my neck, the jeweled dagger in my hand, Brecke’s blade on my thigh—all of it melted away, dripping to the soil before charring into hunks of ash.