But Séverin didn’t give him the chance.
35
LAILA
Laila did not trust her body.
It had failed her by not lasting long enough. It had failed her by filling her soul with the wingbeats of false hope. It had failed her now by showing her something that could not be real. Each blink of her eyes, each beat of her heart rendered what she saw more sharply until she could not ignore her own senses.
Séverin had killed Zofia.
Séverin had walked to her, his gait unchanging, purposeful. He looked down at Zofia, and Lailawishedshe had not seen her friend’s face. She wished she hadn’t seen her blue eyes widening, hope glossing her gaze.
How many times had they done this? How many times had Séverin swept in at the last moment… and freed them?
Hope squeezed through the cracks of logic. There was a moment—bright and suspended—where Séverin bent down, as if to whisper in Zofia’s ear, and Laila thought all might still be well.She could not see her hope for what it was, nothing more than a silvered serpent.
“No!” she called out.
But it changed nothing. Zofia slumped to the ground, beside Enrique who squirmed and kicked out against the ice as Séverin turned to him. Then he too went still.
Gone.
They were bothgone.
And for some reason, she was still here. The wrongness slanted through her heart. She was not supposed to outlive them. She thought about her mother on the day she died. For two days before her death, Laila had clutched her mother’s hand so tightly, she was convinced her soul wouldn’t be able to find its way out of the body. In that time, her father’s grief became a land of exile. One that, perhaps, he never left. Maybe that was why he knelt at his wife’s bed when he thought their daughter had gone to sleep. Maybe that was why he said:I keep praying they will take her instead of you.
Her mother had shushed him for saying such things:I would never wish for the pain to outlive the ones I love. Even in this, I can find God’s blessing.
To outlive the ones she loved.
She had not considered such a thing to be a curse until now. Though how long that existence would last, she could not say.
Laila had always wanted her last sight to be beautiful—and he was. He was moving darkness, and he was all she could see. Séverin walked toward her, rubbing his thumb across his mouth. Laila zeroed in on that mouth, the same one that had spoken such truths and whispered her name as if it were an invocation meant to save him. The same one that had just condemned her to death.
I’m dying—
I know.
Such words held all the finality of a thrust blade. He knew. He knew, and he didn’t care. Laila wanted to believe she had dreamt up all of the last hours’ tenderness—his kiss, his smile, his body curling around hers in sleep. But then, peeking out over the collar of his shirt, Laila glimpsed the evidence of last night: a smudge of her lip rouge.Wrong wrong wrong.How could she have been so wrong?
“Laila—” started Eva, looking stricken. “I never… I thought—”
Laila tuned her out.
“I take it killing her won’t make you play the lyre either, will it?” asked Ruslan.
“No,” said Séverin. “She’ll die soon anyway, and my knife is too slippery. I’d like to get moving before dark. I am sure we have a ways to travel.”
Ruslan nodded. He reached for the lyre on the ground. The strings still shimmered from Séverin’s blood, but the light in them had dulled. Laila stared after it. Her body had failed her once more, for while it might look like a member of the Lost Muses… that too had been a lie.
“Goodbye, Laila,” said Ruslan, waving sadly. “You might not be a true muse, but you will live on as inspiration to me.”
He blew her a kiss and then glanced to Eva.
“Knock her out.”
HOURS LATER, LAILA WOKE UPsprawled out on the ice.
