Especially not when she shakily drifted toward the chair behind her desk and sank into it, her porcelain features now ashen, as if she had just seen a ghost. Almost as if to herself, she whispered, “You see me like you do in my vision?”
The wordvisionsnagged in his thoughts like a hook. “Your…vision?” he echoed, the hairs on his arm prickling. She had never spoken of her vision with him, not since the day in his bedchamber when he admitted he already knew about it.
Curiosity gnawed at him, warring with his guilt. He needed to tell her his own secrets.
But he wanted to know hers, too. Hehadto know.
Slowly, cautiously, he grabbed one of the spare chairs from in front of the desk and dragged it around until it rested beside hers. “Tell me about your vision, kirei,” he softly prompted while easing himself into that seat.
Hesitation wrote itself across Sera’s face. Uncertainty.
Until he tacked on a quiet, “Please.”
A humorless smile tugged at his wife’s lips. Now she avoided his gaze, her own eyes fixed on the desk, on the map of the known world unfurled there. Small stones in various colors littered the map, marking out threats within her borders.
And beyond, too.
One such marker rested in the forests of Drakmor, the nameBonesingerpainted across its surface in her swooping hand. Hischest tightened. Of course, she had been worrying for his homeland, too.
It shouldn’t have undone him. But it did.
“You will think me mad, Aldric—”
“I won’t,” he whispered, leaning closer. “I promise. I won’t.”
He watched her swallow. He studied the way she wet her lips. Finally, she exhaled, “I see you bound in chains,” and the room seemed to close in further. The floor seemed to tilt. The fire in the hearth sputtered, nearly winking out.
The breath rushed out of him as if someone had just driven a fist into his gut.
As if from far away, his kirei’s voice echoed, “We are in a wasteland filled with black sand. It is night.” But he was no longer in the study. He was no longer anywhere but in his awful dream.
His wretched nightmare.
“…I try to free you, but I never can…”
Kneeling on black sands with Sera dead at his feet.
“…the stars are falling…the darkness is coming…the world is ending…”
While that cold voice taunted him and called him a monster.
Clenching his eye shut, he tried to blot the memory from his mind, to snuff it out completely. He didn’t want to remember her like that. He didn’t want to think about what might have been.
“Aldric?”
His eye flashed back open. He was in the study with Sera, her lovely face hovering close to his. Too close. Clearing his throat, he twitched away from her and rasped, “I’m fine.”
But his hands trembled, betraying him.
He clasped them together and squeezed hard, refusing to let her see.
His kirei frowned, worry etching itself between her eyebrows. “I am sorry,” she whispered, as if she had anything at all to be sorry about. “I know it is…” She swallowed. “Unsettling.”
“No,” he bit out, shaking his head, denying it hotly. “You have not unsettled me.”
A question nagged at the back of his mind—a question to which he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her answer. But still, he asked, “Is there…a voice in this vision?”
“Voice?” Her lips trembled around the word. “Why do you ask?”
