“I need your help,” I said, no preamble. “We need to go to France.”
Her knowing eyes held mine. “For the cure.”
I nodded. I shouldn’t be surprised. She was always perceptive.
“Dante and Orren will never agree,” she said. “Nero placed your safety above everything.”
“That’s why I need you. We have to go now, while he’s unconscious. While he can’t stop us.”
Morrigan was silent for a long moment, the only sound the distant toll of a bell. Then she gave a single, sharp nod. “I’ll help you. If there’s a chance, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
We moved quickly. Saturday morning arrived, a day without classes. Morrigan invited Dante and Orren to a private breakfast in the Victorian house they shared. She had prepared everything.
The tea was laced with a sleeping draught.
Guilt twisted in my chest as I watched Dante and Orren drink the tea, their trust in her and in me a weight in the room. But this was for Nero. They would understand.
Within five minutes, both were slumped in their chairs, breathing deep and even. The draught would hold them for hours.
“We need to move,” Morrigan urged. “As soon as they wake, they’ll come for us.”
She had prepared everything. We slipped out of the academy. When the plane landed at an airfield in France, a van was waiting.
Morrigan took the wheel. She knew the route without my direction—she’d been the driver when Orren and Dante kidnapped me from my garden. We passed by the French town in a blur. Morrigan pulled the van to a halt near the cabin where I’d lived nineteen years of my life and killed the engine.
“We’re here,” she said. “You take the lead now.”
I stepped out, and the cold seized me. December in France was a blade. The wind sliced through my jacket, but I ignored it.
My old cabin looked smaller than I remembered. The wooden walls were weathered to a dull gray, paint curlingaway. The windows were filmed with dust. The back door hung crooked on its hinges—I remembered its familiar, protesting squeak. We’d never had the oil to fix it, not after Mom’s medical bills spiked high.
For nineteen years, it had been just Mom and me in that tiny space, holding the world at bay.
I didn’t go inside but walked around to the once beautiful garden. Now, nature had reclaimed it. Weeds choked the paths. Vines ensnared the fence. The plants I’d cultivated had either withered or burst their boundaries in an untamed sprawl.
And there, at the garden’s edge, encircled by a ring of stones, was Mom’s grave.
The marker was simple, a flat stone I’d carved myself with shaking hands the day after I buried her. The wind here was quieter, as if even the air respected this small, hallowed ground.
Sara Aurelius.
Walks Among Forgotten Gods
And Never Forgotten Here.
I dropped to my knees before the stone.
A sob tore from my chest. The grief returned, fresh and raw as the day she’d left me. I pressed my palm against the cold, rough surface.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I left you here alone.”
For nineteen years, I had believed it would always be just us. That when she died, I would remain in this cabin, tending her grave, keeping watch over her memory until my own end. I never imagined leaving. Never dreamed I would have a reason to.
But then they came and hurled me into Reaper Academy, into a world of gods and magic and danger.
And I foundhim.
My king. My mate across every lifetime.
