This wound was not survivable.
I was too late.
Sorrow crushed my heart. Despair gutted me. Tossing my head back, I howled in agony like a wounded beast. The world around me went dark, despite the sunshine. I was only half-aware of the orcs crashing through the underbrush to join us on the creek bank.
“Is she…” Agor’s voice filtered to me as if through a fog.
“Gone,” Pip said quietly.
“And the duke?”
“Also dead.”
“Have you killed all his guards?” Becca asked softly as the orcs from my keep gathered around. All armed and ready to fight. Only they were too late, too.
“No. Some ran away,” Pip said.
White-hot anger burst through me. The agony of loss forged into the intense thirst for revenge.
“Kill them all,” I growled, fisting the handle of my sword so hard, my knuckles cracked and my fingers ached.
“No. Leave them,” came the unexpectedly quiet voice that I knew so well and loved so dearly.
Shock jolted my body like a lightning strike. Hope bloomed anew.
“Khala?” I stared at her.
She gazed at me without a shadow of pain in her expression.
Becca sank to her knees at Khala’s side across from me.
“Are you alive? But how?” she asked.
Words deserted me. My throat closed up, choking my cry of relief.
Khala was alive, and I didn’t care how.
CHAPTER 14
KHALA
With a strangled gulp of air, Grat pressed me to him, burying his face in my neck and squishing the bloody mess of guts between us.
“I’m so, so sorry, sweetie,” I murmured, kissing his bald head.
A shudder crossed his wide shoulders, and I stroked his back soothingly. It broke my heart to see him suffer.
“It had to be done. Or they would’ve never left us alone.” I kissed him again.
“Arethey going to leave us alone now?” asked a large orc with a long beard and equally long dark-green hair gathered in a tie on top of his head.
The red-haired human woman kneeling next to us gazed at me with compassion.
“Give her a minute, Agor,” she said. “She’s just basically come back from the dead…somehow.”
With a grunt of concern, Grat leaned away from me, surveying the gore on my belly.
I gave him a comforting smile.
