When I met her gaze, I saw how her green irises disappeared and were replaced with churning milky pools caught in a sightless stare. Saw an ancient scrawl drag across them, the language indecipherable, the size far too small.
That milky gaze held me hostage, and then she opened her mouth and spoke a single word, in a voice that was not entirely her own.
“Goldfinch.”
That one word, torn from a diviner’s lips. And right now, it’s pulled from my own mouth and laid at Auren’s feet like an offering.
I was fifteen years old when I first heard it, and back then, that word meant nothing to me. It frustrated me. Confused me. It was a word I agonized over. A word I tried to ask my mother about over and over again, to no avail.
But then…after twenty years, I found the meaning.
Found what was foretold.
Auren’s breaths saw out of her as I brush away another tear and swallow hard. “With skin of gold and wearing feathers of a finch, I knew right then that you were mine. I realized what that divined word had meant,” I tell her, emotion cracking through my constricted throat. “While I was broken and ripped and utterly lost, my mother gifted me with the promise ofyou, Auren. The promise of my päyur.”
A tear stabs through the corner of my eye and slices down my cheek, while Auren’s eyes overflow. Love and misery carried in each drop and drowning out my existence.
“My foretelling, my life’s prophecy, my purpose, my divined wasyou,” I choke out. “Always you.”
A sob bubbles up with blood that gilds her paling lips.
“Goldfinch,” I murmur miserably before I gently place my lips at her cheek, fingers still cradling her face.
Trying to cradle her fading soul.
“You were always mine, and I was always meant to love you with every single part of my existence.”
Always.
She weeps as she bleeds. I rock as I hold her. And still, I pleadno.
Please, no.
Auren looks up at me with heartbreak, her expression in agony. “We…we won’t g-get ourone days, Slade,” she says with anguish.
My heart fucking disintegrates, but I manage to shake my head. I curl around her, offering her shivering body every ounce of warmth I have.
“Yes we will, baby,” I rasp out as I stroke her tortured expression. “Don’t you remember?I will find you in any life. So just wait for me, okay?” My breath snaps off, but I force my voice to keep working. “I will find you wherever you go, and we will have endlessone daysof happiness. Won’t we? Won’t we, Auren?”
She nods, though we both know the truth.
No.
Her failing body is fraught with a sob. With heartbreak. With fractured despair.
And I rage against it, but still, the veil of death comes.
“I love you, Goldfinch. In every life,” I choke out, my tears falling onto her cheek.
“I love you…in them…all,” she says back, her voice a struggled whisper. A shaken breath.
Then her golden eyes close, her aura goes dark, her ribbons fall, and her heart beats no more. Her pulse silences, right beneath my grip.
And my mother opens her mouth and speaks one single word just as my soul shatters.
“Goldfinch.”
CHAPTER 60
