But her eyes, soft, pleading, knowing, bore into mine.
“I made him do it, my daughter,” Lesara whispers, her voice thin but resolute. “I sealed a deal with him… to prove my love for you.”
And my heart shatters like a stone to a mirror.
“It’s okay,” my mother says in peace and acceptance.
I’m sorry. Kael pleads down the tether.
And like a chorus of pain, they repeat.
“It’s okay.”
I’m sorry.
“It’s okay.”
I’m sorry.
“It’s okay.”
I’m sorry.
The chorus blurs around me.
A cacophony of unbearable regret and unconditional acceptance.
Until the words overlap, indistinguishable—love and loss spoken in the same breath.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
KAEL
Her blood.Lesara’s.It coats my palms, runs down Elyssara’s wrists, pools between us like proof of every sin I swore I’d never repeat.
She’s making a sound I can’t name—half-scream, half-prayer—and the tether between us convulses, pouring her grief through me until I’m choking on it.
I thought I understood consequence. I thought I’d bled enough to balance the scales.
I was a fool.
Because this isn’t balance. This is damnation wearing her mother’s face.
She needed you to know she loved you, my light.I force the words down the tether, desperate to slice through her pain.
She begged me to let her have this. To help you. To give you life. To love you in the only way she thought you’d understand. I keep pushing, fighting my way to her.
Elyssara’s breath shudders, broken.
Lesara’s body crumbles to the floor in a heavy thud, and lands at an unnatural angle.
I release Elyssara’s hand, and the blade in her palm clatters to the floor, the sound final and absolute.
Her mother is gone.
She drops to her knees, her hands hovering above her mother’s body, trembling, slick with blood and disbelief.
“She— She wanted this?” The words scrape from her throat, raw and small. “To leave me—again?”
