I cry out, collapsing onto my side. The pain is a white-hot starburst in my shoulder, radiating down my arm, stealing my breath.
"Imas!" Leora screams. She lunges, breaking the soldier's grip for a second, scrambling toward me on her hands and knees.
The soldier grabs her by the hair again, jerking her back so hard her neck snaps. She cries out, a sound of pure agony.
"Stay down, bitch," the soldier growls.
I push myself up. I have to get up. I have to reach her.
I crawl. I drag myself across the stone, leaving a smear of blood behind me. My vision is tunneling. The world is reduced to the sight of her face, twisted in pain, and the boot of the soldier pressing her into the floor.
Malek steps on my hand. He grinds his heel into my fingers, crushing them against the stone.
I gasp, but I do not stop looking at her.
"Pathetic," Malek spits. "Look at you. Crawling in the dirt for a human pet. You are a disgrace to the Khuzuth."
He shifts his grip on the axe. He raises it again. This time, the edge is down. This time, it is for my neck.
"Any last words, Master of Night?" Malek asks.
The world slows down.
The scent of burning wood and old paper fades. The pain in my shoulder dulls to a distant throb.
I look at Leora.
She has stopped fighting. She is staring at me, her eyes wide, the sapphire blue swallowed by the Purna blackness. She is frozen in horror. She thinks this is the end. She thinks I have failed.
And I have. I have failed to protect her. I have failed to hold my power. I have failed to be the monster the world needed me to be.
But as I look at her—at the tangle of her dark hair, at the fierce, terrifying love in her eyes—I realize something.
I do not regret the silence. I do not regret the loss of the magic. I would burn a thousand cities, I would slaughter every priest in the temple, I would tear the sky down just to have had that one hour of peace in her arms.
She is not a poison. She is the antidote to a life I didn't know was a sickness. She inhabits the hollow spaces of my soul, filling them with a light that is brighter than any star. She is the breath in my lungs. She is the beat of my heart.
She owns me. Utterly. Completely.
I cannot speak. Malek’s power is pressing down on my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs.
So I mouth the words, shaping them with my bloody lips so she will know, so she will carry them with her into the dark, a talisman against the night that is coming for her.
I love you.
It is not enough. The words are too small, too human to contain the sheer, devastating magnitude of what I feel. But they are all I have.
Malek grunts, his muscles bunching as he brings the axe down.
20
LEORA
The axe begins its descent.
It moves with a terrifying slowness, a gleaming arc of execution carving through the stagnant, dust-choked air. Time does not stop; it stretches, pulling the moment taut until it sings with the unbearable tension of a snapping wire.
Imas looks at me. His lips form the shapes of three words.
