I slumped to my knees, ignoring the lump his handwriting brought to my throat and scanning the documents.
One word stood out:Sacrifice?
It was circled, darkened as if traced over multiple times. I could picture him hunched over the desk, worrying at the end of his pen, dragging his hands through his hair as he struggled to piece it all together the way I did now.
One thing was clear from his repetitive theories: Kakias had not shared everything with my father.
She had indeed made a deal with the dark pools. What she offered them, I didn’t know, but I had a suspicion it was tied to the plan she’d concocted with my father and the haphazard way her army now marched across the continent. She had sacrificed some part of herself to the secrets lurking within those tar pits.
And my father hadn’t known.
He had suspected, based on the scrawl before me. He’d listed notes about the workings of dark power and the notable times it had been abused in history, but he hadn’t solved it.
And…Ophelia.
Flipping through the pages, I stopped on two familiar words:Chosen Child. An arrow pointed to the top of the page, to the phraseblood of the Chosen will grant the wish. And below it, words that were quickly becoming my undoing:sacrifice her.
I stood and stumbled back a step.
It was all I could do to pull air into my lungs. Papers crumpled in my fists.
I had given myself over. I had signed that fucking treaty and submitted to torture, in large part to protect Ophelia, because she was supposed to live out her life unknowing and happy. And I’d realized the mistake I made in that, but what I hadn’t realized was my error in thinking that with my father gone and his truths exposed, she was safe.
Ophelia was never safe, because Kakias had made a deal that involved the sacrifice of theChosen Child. That’s exactly how Damien had referred to her—and clearly the queen knew that.
And we’d been oblivious for months, allowing her edge on us to increase.
Hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor, and my head snapped up. Everyone was watching me, concern painting their expressions. Rina rounded the corner at top speed and came to a halt in the middle of the room, Esmond breathing heavily behind her.
“What the—” She looked around the catastrophe of the office, but shook her head. “I don’t care. We have a problem.”
“We have a lot of problems.” I shook the papers I’d found. “It’s—it’s true. Kakias made a deal. And now, whatever she got from thatdeal, requires sacrificing the Chosen Child.” I was panting, my chest tightening. “Sacrificing Ophelia.”
Silence dropped over the room, ringing like the echoes of an explosion.
“What?” Santorina gasped.
But Jezebel ripped my father’s papers from my hands, sharing them with Cyph.
The treaty, imprisonment, the war—Spirits we’d been in the dark about the true causes of it all. Pawns in a larger game that now threatened to crush me.
That night I’d been convinced to sign the contract came back to me, terror burning scarlet across my vision as my hand was forced. I rammed my fingers through my hair, gripping it at the scalp, my breathing rapid and shallow.
“Breathe in,” someone said from my side, snapping me from the memory. I whipped around to see Mila. “Breathe in, count to four.”
It was hard to calm myself enough to focus on counting, but I did as she said, watching the lashes flutter around her almond-shaped blue eyes.
“Now hold it for seven. Count down from eight on the exhale.”
By the time I’d repeated the meditation three times, the rest of the room had skimmed my father’s papers, conversation exploding among them.
“Rina, what’s the other problem?” I asked, and they all fell silent.
Fingers fiddling with the corner of the thick book she held, Rina swallowed. “Ophelia asked me to research curses. She assured me the Undertaking had healed her, but there was something unsettling in her tone. She seemed particularly interested in those cast by higher powers, but I couldn’t find any information here. So, I went to the Sacra Temple and dug into the Angels and the Undertaking. That led me to a tiny shop deep in the Ascended Quarter, the Reverent Tome. They carry everything from wards against haunted spirits to books with banned legends. And I found…well…”
She propped the book on the back of a chair and turned to a dog-eared page. “Of all the curses that exist among warriors, the most infamous is the Angelcurse. Though it exists largely in folklore and there has not been suspicion of a case in hundreds of years, the most recent rumorwas a Mystique Warrior tasked by the higher beings themselves. There is no cure but blood for seraphs kissed by the Angels. Death is the ultimate sacrifice.”
“Oh, fuckingSpirits,” Jezebel hissed, her face pale.
