MasukKIVAI read the letter again. Then again. The words hadn't changed. Ada was dead.My fingers tightened around the paper until it crumpled slightly at the edges. "No."Tamara stood across from me, silent. For once she wasn't making a joke or pretending nothing could reach her. She stared at the letter in my hand."She can't be." My voice cracked.Tamara swallowed. "That's what we're going to find out.""What?""We're going to the old-age home." She said it quietly, and there was something in her voice that was colder than I had heard from her before. "I don't believe it either."I looked down at the letter again. The messenger had said Ada had requested it be delivered after her death. But nothing about that made sense. Ada had been alive. She had sat with me and held my hands and told me things about my mother, about Tamara, about eighteen years of protecting us. She had looked me in the eyes and given me everything she had been carrying. And now suddenly she was gone.How. Why. And w
PAIGEThe first thing I noticed when I stepped into the room was that Bryan was alive. The second was that he looked terrible. Good. He deserved worse. He sat at the center of the abandoned warehouse with his arm wrapped in a bloodstained cloth, surrounded by the remnants of his men. Most of them looked exhausted. One had a swollen eye. Another was favouring his left leg. Apparently Tamara had left an impression. None of them noticed me at first. That was almost insulting consideirng how much power those creepy witches had given me, they were supposed to feel that I, Paige had step into the room they should shiver and bow in fear, but no they did quite the opposite by not even noticing. What else could I expect from rascals like them?Bryan was speaking. "We lay low."One of the men frowned. "For how long?""Until we know where the twins are.""The twins?"Bryan's expression darkened. "Don't say their names like they're some ordinary fucking women. That bicth nearly killed us "I step
Catherine (Sorceress)Paige was gone.I watched the door close behind her and smiled. She had no idea what she had just agreed to. None of them ever did. People saw power and forgot to ask what it cost. They saw a door and never thought to wonder who had built it or why it had been left open at exactly the right moment. I turned toward the altar and looked at the dark mark on my wrist. The same mark my brothers carried. The same mark now moving beneath Paige's skin whether she could feel it yet or not. She would think it was a gift. It wasn't. It was a leash, and eventually she would feel the tension of it, but by then it would not matter."Do you really think she'll do it?" one of the men asked.I glanced over my shoulder. "She will, she claims she’s strong— the baddest but in truth Paige is not just weak in heart but in strength, she nothing compared to the twins epesically now that Kiva knows she is pure blood. Paige has accpeted not just because she wants power but because she is
PAIGEThe Kiraman estate had never felt this small.Or perhaps I had simply never noticed before how empty it could become when the right people stopped paying attention. I stood at the top of the staircase and looked down at the movement below. Servants crossing the entrance hall. My father's study door closed in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody talking about Fabian anymore. That was the part that made something hot and ugly move through my chest. A few weeks ago he had been the heir of the Southern Gates. My fiancé. The man every conversation eventually circled back to. Now it was as though he had been edited out of the record entirely.I tightened my fingers around the railing.Even his family had started moving on. One of the older servants walked past me without looking up from the tray she was carrying. I almost laughed. How quickly people forgot. How quickly they moved from grieving to inconvenienced to absent.Giovanni stumbled out of the library down the corridor. He was d
KIVAFor a while, neither of us said anything. I stayed in Damien's arms with my cheek pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Steady. Human. Real. I closed my eyes and let the sound of it do what it always did, which was make the rest of the world feel manageable."I'm sorry." My eyes opened. His hand stilled briefly in my hair."I'm sorry for everything you went through because of me."I lifted my head. "Damien—""I remember enough." His voice was quiet. "The forest. The way I looked at you. The things I almost—""You didn't do them.""But I could have.""You didn't." He looked down at me and the guilt in his eyes was the old kind, the kind that had been living in him long before I ever appeared in his life. I touched his cheek. "You're here now."He covered my hand with his. "I don't deserve you.""You're going to have to stop saying things like that."A faint smile. "I'll try.""Good." I settled back against him.A thought crossed my mind. I smiled before I spoke. "
“IF YOU WERE A PIANO, I’D SPREAD YOUR LEGS LIKE KEYS, PRESS EVERY SOFT NOTE WITH MY TONGUE, AND PLAY YOU UNTIL THE ONLY SOUND LEFT WAS YOU COMING ON MY MOUTH.”KIVA His mouth stayed on mine, unhurried at first, then deeper, like he was making sure I was real. I kept my hands on his face, feeling the warmth of his skin under my palms, the way his jaw flexed when he kissed me harder. The piano was cold under my thighs. His body was not. He stepped between my legs without asking and the solid press of him made my breath catch against his lips in a way that felt strange and new.He pulled back just enough to look at me. His eyes were still darker than they should have been, but the gold was there now, steady, and something else under it that looked almost drunk on the fact that I was right here. He didn’t speak. He just stared like he was memorizing the exact shape of my mouth.Then his hands moved.One stayed at my waist, the other slid under the hem of my shirt and up, slow and deliber
"The cruelest people are not the ones who hurt you. They are the ones who watch and decide it is not their problem."KIVAShe held out her hand, palm up, like this was already settled, like I had already agreed, like the outcome of this moment had never really been in question.And maybe, in this h
"The bravest thing a broken person can do is say yes to something good."KIVA."Yes."The word came out broken by tears, cracked right down the middle, not elegant at all, not the way I had ever imagined saying something like that if I was ever lucky enough to be asked something like this."Yes, Fa
“THE DREAMS WE CANNOT CONTROL ALREADY OWNS US”DAMIEN (HADES) POVI am in the dream again, and I always know I'm dreaming the moment it starts, but that never gives me control over it because it just means I'm aware enough to suffer through it properly.It begins in silence, not a peaceful silence
“ ALLOW YOURSELF TO SHINE WITHOUT BEING SEEN” KIVA POV.He looked at me for a moment like he was deciding how much to say."The Decaulion," he said.I went still.The name alone did that. Even to someone like me, someone who had spent most of her life looking down rather than up at the structures







