So strong in my sensitive hearing that it drives me upward, wrenching me to my feet.
Pain roars through me, radiating from my heart and shooting through my limbs, sharp and undeniable.
I take a deep breath, open my mouth, and roar out the agony, long and loud, sending more ice spearing across the floor. “Let me die in peace!”
Let me be.
Still, those ancient voices scream at me, battering me into the desk so hard that fissures spread across its surface.
Trying to breathe, I plant my fists on the wooden tabletop, my chest heaving and breaths rasping. Furious. Wrathful.
Forced to live.
A brief silence falls, a stunning reprieve from the unbearable melody, and then…finally…aboomthat shakes me to my core.
A final beat. A fucking command.
It’s time to live.
I’m awake.
I’m alive.
My heart may be irreversibly damaged. Only time will tell. But I’m fucking alive.
And that’s all that matters.
Chapter Forty-Four
Antony
My ears might be bleeding. My heart could be exploding.
All I know is that the melody shrieking around me could end me.
Thyra stands, half-naked, dressed only in the long, black pants she chose. She presses her arm across her breasts, the same tantalizing pose she struck at my cabin, her tangled hair falling around her shoulders, and her blue eyes wide.
She appears as startled as a doe caught in my dangerous gaze.
Her thumb…a mere fucking finger…presses down onto the Lethian dress and every drag of her skin against the material plays the threads like an instrument, shrieking and discordant, both desperate and heartbreakingly hopeful.
My hands claw the floor as I try to drag myself to her, roaring as loudly as I can, unable to hear my own voice above the overwhelming music. “Thyra! Let it go!”
Let the dress go.
She straightens from her bend, and now I can see a singlethread caught on the pad of her thumb, unraveling from the dress as she moves.
Her face pales as her wild gaze swings from me to Cassia, where my sister huddles on the floor, her hands pressed over her ears.
Cassia’s crying, but I can’t hear her.
The walls tremble. An alarming crack appears in the surface on my right, the vibrations in the air becoming catastrophic.
Thyra’s focus suddenly flies back to the dress, and her whisper cuts through the noise. “Sung with love…”
She bends again, and I brace for pure destruction. Complete annihilation. The cracking of walls. Crumbling of towers.
The obliteration of this city.
