جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 50

LUCIEN'S POV The rogues are still quiet. That was the part I couldn't get past. I had been sitting with reports spread across my desk for the better part of the morning and every time I tried to focus on something else my mind came back to it. Not the attacks....the silence. The sudden, complete, coordinated silence across every territory simultaneously. Rogues didn't do anything in unison. They moved on instinct and hunger and nothing else. And yet they had all stopped at exactly the same time, before our warriors reached them, which meant someone had told them to stop and they had listened. Someone with reach. Someone with information from inside this palace. I pressed my fingers against the desk and stared at the map. The door opened. I didn't look up. "I didn't grant entry." "Good morning," Seraphine said. I looked up. She stood in the center of my study like she had every right to be there, which was exactly how she had stood in every room she had ever walked into. She

AYLIN'S POV The first thing I was aware of was the headache. Blinding. Sitting behind my eyes and radiating outward with every heartbeat, the kind that made thinking feel like something that needed to be attempted carefully and in small amounts. I opened my eyes. The ceiling was unfamiliar for exactly three seconds before my mind caught up. My room, the fire burning low in the hearth, the curtains drawn against the light. I turned my head, my eyes adjusting to four figures standing vigil around my bed. Lucien, Terak, Kaelen and the woman I hadn't been introduced to officially but whose face I recognised immediately....the same jaw, the same eyes, the same unmistakable resemblance that could only mean one thing. Seraphine "How are you feeling?" Lucien, His voice was controlled but something underneath it wasn't quite. I looked down. He was holding my hand. Why would he hold my hand and most especially in front of everyone here. I moved it gently, shifting it back toward m

I didn't mean to fall asleep.I was waiting for Seraphine to come back, watching the door, the herbs still sitting on the side table half prepared. My eyes were heavy from the fever and the headache, and at some point the ceiling stopped being something I was looking at and became something I was falling away from.The meadow again.Silver grass. Moonlight. The particular stillness of a place that existed just outside of everything real.I stood in the center of it and waited, because I knew now. I knew how this went.The figure appeared at the edge of the meadow.Not my mother. Not anything I recognised. Just a shape.... vague and still, standing at the tree line where the silver grass met the dark, faceless, unreadable, present.Brace yourself."For what," I said. "Tell me for what. You keep saying that and you never...."What is ahead will require everything you have. Brace yourself, Aylin."That's not an answer." I took a step forward. The figure didn't move. "What is coming? What

I woke up drenched in my own sweat.Another nightmareI was not going back to sleep.I lay on my back in the dark staring at the ceiling and made that decision with everything I had. My body was tired....genuinely, deeply tired but my mind was more tired of what sleep kept bringing me, and the thought of closing my eyes and finding myself back in that forest, the figure dropping from the branches, was something I could not make myself do again tonight.I was done.Done with the dreams. Done with the whispers. Done with the silver light threading through my veins like something that hadn't asked permission to be there. Done with the chair sitting on the other side of the room that I had refused to move back after Seraphine left and was now trying very hard not to look at.I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.I pushed the covers back, wrapped the blanket from the foot of the bed around my shoulders, and walked out the door.I didn't have a destination. I just walked t

LUCIEN'S POV She had fallen asleep.I noticed the way her breathing changed, deepened, the slight drop of her head against the back of the chair. The blanket still wrapped around her shoulders. Her hands loose in her lap.I set my quill down and looked at her for a long moment.Then I got up.I crossed to her chair and crouched down, bringing myself level with her face. She was completely still, her features smoothed out into something unguarded that I didn't see when she was awake.... all the quiet watchfulness gone, all the careful composure resting. Just her face. Just the particular peace of someone who had finally, after what I suspected had been several very difficult nights, stopped fighting sleep long enough to let it have her.I reached out and moved the hair from her face.She stirred and mumbled silently.She was beautiful.And I wanted to kiss her, I could have kissed her.She was close, so close.She wanted it as much as I did, but I couldn't do it.Not untill I k