“I don’t want it.”
“That’s why you have to take it.” His fingers brush my cheek, coaxing me to look at him. “It can’t fall into the wrong hands.”
“It shouldn’t fall intomyhands,” I say, adamant, because even now, even with all the honesty in his eyes and the absence of subterfuge, I sense there’s something he isn’t telling me.
And then it hits me.
What he’s been hiding from me.
“I gave you the power in my heart.” I try to speak past the fear rising within me. “If you die, what happens to that power?”
His jaw clenches, and I know the answer.
“It will die with you,” I whisper, a deep horror billowing within me. “I will become heartless. Alive but without feeling. And I will lose my reason. My protectiveness. My restraint. Myfeeling. All of the things that make meme. All of that will die with you.”
I try to breathe. “When you die, I will become a monster.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Irecall the way Lucian described me in the vision he’d seen inThe Book of Dark Magic.
“In the book, my eyes were dead,” I say. “I had no heart. No soul.”
I fight the sick, clawing feeling wrapping itself around my chest. A cold chill fills my bones.
I speak rapidly as an awful panic billows in waves through me. “This is how it happens, isn’t it?” I ask. “You die, I lose my heart, and I take the crown without hesitation. Then, I wreak justice on every dark creature who was complicit in my mother’s imprisonment. Everyone who profited from my father’s regime while I was caged. The entire Nostra Empire. Human and supernatural. I raze it to the ground in cold-blooded murder.”
I give a bleak laugh. “But why stop there?The Book of Dark Magiccould only reveal the fates of dark magic creatures, yes? What’s to say I don’t tear through other beings too? After all, with that kind of power, I can kill anything. Dragons, angels, witches, shifters, old gods. Who would stop me?”
I’m gripping the keeper so hard that my claws must be biting his back and sides, but all I can hear is my father’s question when he trapped me in his lair.
“Have you ever seen true darkness?”
“Who would stop me?” I ask again, my voice like stone. “Some red-winged creature who doesn’t get to me until I’ve taken a thousand lives?”
The keeper has remained impossibly calm, letting me speak all of my fears, as if he knows I need to voice them.
But now, he says, “Youwill stop you.” His gray-blue eyes are suddenly piercing. “Because before I die, you will take back your heart’s power.”
I jolt away from him, but he doesn’t let me go. “But that will kill you instantly. Just like taking the crown will kill you.” My voice is a snarl now. “Both of those actswill kill you.”
“Yes.”
I bare my teeth at him in all my wolfish fury. “No.”
He gives me a gentle smile. “You must, Caera. Just as you must take the crown. Keep your heart. Take the crown. You will do these things?—”
“No!”
“You will do these things.” His voice remains calm. “Because your heart tells you they are right.”
“Not right for you.”
One corner of his mouth hitches up in a crooked smile. “Even so.” Then his smile fades. “I want you to see something.”
I don’t like that he’s veering our conversation in another direction, but I can’t deny the solemnity in his expression. “What is it?”
“Will you come to the mirror?”
