Someone tried to shoot me…and he stepped in front of the bullet.
For a heartbeat I can’t move, or breathe, or doanythingbut watch Elias crumple to his knees, his breath rattling in his throat with a wet rasp. The world turns black around the edges of my vision, and no sound breaks through the rush of my pulse hammering in my ears.
Then a grunt in the distance snaps my focus toward it. A wounded guard with barely enough strength to lift his pistol from his spot on the hill aims it shakily at me again.
With Elias crumpled at my feet, something inside of me snaps under the anger and guilt coursing through my body in uneven waves.
I don’t want to feel sympathy for him. I don’t want to think that maybe he’s trying to make amends for his complicit actions. I don’t want to think that he should have let me be shot, because I can heal from it and he can’t…but I do.
A snarl rips out of me as I launch toward the guard, his panicked eyes wide and unable to track my movement with his shaky gun. My hand clamps around his neck, my fingers digging in deep, and with a vicious twist I hear the crack split the night. I summon my daggers and slam Kael through his heart for good measure.
His body folds uselessly to the dirt, his head lolling at an unnatural angle. I stand over him, chest heaving as bitteremotions twine through me. I turn back and the sight guts me all over again.
Elias collapsed in the dirt, Callum slumped unconscious in the brush, and Dante sprawled next to him. All three of them are down, blood seeping into the ground like the world means to claim their lives as the prize for my escape.
I glance down at my hand as the ruby ring catches the moonlight.
I just need to make one choice. I can open the portal now and be gone in a breath.
So why do I hesitate and let my eyes fall back to the three of them?
“Fuck this,” I whisper to the night sky, voice breaking as my head tips back. “Why…why can’t I just leave you behind and call it a day?”
I’ve bled enough. Endured enough.
Kael and Lyra’s voices stir immediately, one dark with hunger, the other soft with grief, both pulling at the edges of me as I hover on the brink of yet another life-changing decision.
“Leave them,”Kael growls, his voice a deep rumble through my mind, thick with bitterness and scorn. “They watched while you screamed. You own them nothing. Choose yourself and your survival, little one.”
My breath hitches, hot tears stinging my eyes as I stare at their broken bodies in the dirt.
“No,”Lyra whispers, her voice trembling but steady, curling softly around my fury. “If you leave them now, you’ll carve out a piece of yourself that will never grow back. Loyalty and compassion have always made you who you are. To abandon them would be to betray who you really are.”
My chest heaves with her gentle words as the scent of Elias’s blood from his sacrifice floats through the air. My legs shakebeneath me, my body caught between two truths ripping me in opposite directions.
Kael snarls again, his tone sharp in my mind. “Haven’t you suffered enough because of them? Go home.”
Lyra presses harder, grief and conviction threaded together. “You’re more than your suffering. More than their prisoner. Don’t let them make you into someone who abandons the wounded. Stay, and you’ll still be you.”
The weight of the ring burns against my finger as my decision hammers in my skull, my heart fracturing with it. There has to be a compromise between the two.
“You can’t take them through the portal like this,”Lyra reminds me. “Deva said never to bring anyone not of sound mind through it. Untethered minds can be lost to the void.”
I’d entirely forgotten that rule, thinking there would never be a time I’d need to do that.
Kael hisses back, “If you stay because of them, you’d give up your chance to go home and be safe. Or you can be back in your bed and with your family tonight.”
My daggers tremble in my grip, until I finally let them go.
The thought of being back with my parents is an ache so fierce I have to stifle the sob forcing itself up my throat. To be back in their embrace after everything…it’s a miracle I never thought I’d feel again.
But I can’t go to them. Not yet.
Underneath my grief, a stubborn thought steers me toward the guys’ slumped bodies: I willnotbe like them. I will not stand by while someone is hurt in their attempt to claim their freedom.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I curse quietly, the words spilling out with every breath as I formulate a quick plan.
One by one, I haul them up onto my shoulder and take them to an idling SUV that is in decent condition compared to the rest. Dante’s heavy body sags against the back seat, groaning faintlywhen I place him down. Callum doesn’t stir at all when I place him on the opposite side of Dante, but his pulse is still steady. On the passenger side, I wrangle Elias into the seat, his chest still leaking warmth through the hole there, his pulse faint beneath my trembling fingers as I strap the seatbelt against his body.
