“What happened here?”
Stellen taps his heart. “This is where the assassin struck. My power took care of his remains, but I wasn’t able to clean up the broken shelves and books and…”
His eyes are shadowed again.
“Stellen?”
“I wanted to bring you here sooner. But also, I didn’t want to bring you here at all.”
I’m about to ask him why, but his focus has shifted to a point on the far side of the room.
I follow his line of sight to the open door situated to the far, right-hand side, its location preventing me from seeing directly through it.
Stellen takes a deep breath, his chest expanding, his expression becoming blank. “You deserve closure, Thyra, even if it’s painful.”
I step warily to the right.
At first, all I see through the far door is the end of a table, then the edge of some sort of large case, clearly made of ice because it’s both transparent and visibly radiating frosty air, and then?—
A cry leaves my lips.
I jolt forward, nearly tripping over a broken shelf in mypath before I push forward, somehow making it to the far door and into the room behind it.
Where my father lies in an icy coffin.
I rush forward, stopping only when the frozen air wafting around the case bites at my body.
My father looks peaceful. He looks…exactly as he was when I left him, his eyes closed, his body perfectly preserved, as if he could be sleeping, not dead.
Oh, no…
I’ve held back this grief with all my might.
A flood of sorrow rushes over me, too sudden for me to handle, too much for me to process.
I never expected to see him again. I despaired that I couldn’t bury him, that I had to leave him behind, slumped beside a carpentry building nearly blown apart by ice and fire.
Now he’s here, and suddenly, I’m reliving the horror of the moment when I found him collapsed with a dagger in his chest, my terror and confusion when he told me to unwrap the blade, and the soul-crushing sorrow when I realized he was already dead, and I can’t…
“I can’t feel this right now.” I stumble backward, forcing myself to move, only to bump into Stellen’s chest. “I can’t break down. I have to keep going. I have to?—”
My knees buckle and Stellen is there, catching me as I fall, scooping me against his side, cradling me as he sinks to the floor with me.
A wail passes my lips. “I can’t do this! I have to keep going!”
“You don’t,” he says, his lips pressing to my forehead, my cheeks. “You’re allowed to feel this. You have time. I’ve given you time, Thyra. You have to feel this or it will become darkness.”
I tip my head back, tears rushing down mycheeks.
He’s right.
Darkness is pressing against my heart and mind. It’s been seething within me for days.
“Why?” I ask, my sorrow intensifying, layer upon layer of grief breaking through the protective shields I’ve built so carefully. A torrent I can’t stop and is too much for me to bear. “Why did you do it?”
Stellen has frozen, his arms clamped around me, my body cradled against him, but I see it in his eyes.
He knows I’m not talking about my father.
