Aedelmar barely even felt the steel as the soldiers began sawing off his wings. He lay on the floor, his empty eyes traveling under the bed to where Lizbeth lay, hand clenched around her mouth and eyes red-rimmed.
His last movement before pain stole his consciousness was to place a single finger upon his blood-soaked lips, encouraging his daughter to stay silent.
She was the Cynn Drakan’s last hope. If she lived, she could avenge her parents, her people. Someday.
She didn’t know the dragon’s name. Arran, the bastard, had guessed correctly. No one in Ethyrios save Aedelmar and Priya knew it.
But if Lizbeth lived, perhaps the memory of this terrible night could forge her into something.
The weapon that would finally excise Arran Zephyrus from this world.
As soon as Cassandra,looking through Aedelmar’s eyes, had seen his young daughter under the bed, that piercing sensation stole her breath and she jumped into the girl’s present.
Or at least, what Cassandra assumed was her present.
All Cassandra could sense around Lizbeth Burkhardt was darkness. Soft, endless darkness.
It was different than the solid wall of white that Cassandra had encountered in Selene’s present. Different than the diaphanous haze of Gareth’s present in the Halfway.
Perhaps Lizbeth was asleep. A deep, dreamless sleep.
Cassandra savored the stillness, especially after that horrific memory. She felt the smallest twinge of sympathy for Aedelmar.
Something stirred Lizbeth’s mind. A rap on a door. A clipped voice. An opened window letting in a damp, fresh scent…
Before Lizbeth woke fully, a hand shook Cassandra’s shoulder and her eyes popped open.
“The somnothian extract is wearing off,” Mireille hissed as she pulled Cassandra to her feet and pushed her from the room. “Go.Go. I’ll meet you back at the shop.”
Cassandra snuck through the back hallway of World’s End, then out the door, hoping that Tristan had learned something from those ledgers and that Ronin had been able to shake Wormwood.
As she walked back to the apothecary, she couldn’t stop thinking about Aedelmar’s memory.
The Koenig was a monster.
But it was the Empire who’d turned him into one.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Ronin’s leg bounced beneath the dining table in Mireille’s apartment. He was more nervous about tonight’s outcome than he was about Cassandra’s appeal.
Cass herself paced before the fireplace despite Tristan’s calm presence beside him.
Ronin wanted to know what Tristan had found in those ledgers. What Cassandra had seen in that memory. But most of all, he wanted Mireille to walk through that door.
Right fucking now.
Creator, if that scarred, blond-headed fuck had put his hands on her in any way, Ronin would?—
The bell tinkled, and Ronin released a relieved sigh at the same time as Cassandra breathed out, “Thank the High Gods” and raced for the apartment door.
She whipped it open and Mireille strode in, refusing to look at him. She pulled her cloak tighter. “I need a shower.”
Ronin wanted to flip the table and slam his fists through the wall.
Twenty minutes later, Mireille was seated next to him, her eyes a bit less dead and glazed—a small mercy.
“Signys,” Cassandra pronounced from Tristan’s lap. “The dragon’s name is Signys. And not that I want to feel any kind of sympathy for Aedelmar, but what Arran Zephyrus did to him, what yourfatherdid to him—” she looked at Tristan “—was pretty awful. He has a daughter who survived. I jumped into her present at the end of the memory, but she was asleep. Mireille pulled me out before I could see where she was.”
