I hid my face against his chest. He nestled his in the crook of my shoulder.
Only then did we let the tears fall.
Mine mixed in with the blood he still had on his armor.
His vanished in my hair.
We shook together in sorrow, holding each other upright against this awful, awful reality.
“He’s dead,” he murmured at last. “He’s dead because of me.”
Chapter 59
Allie
The fortress felt worse than a mausoleum, the silence so ugly, not even mourning dared disturb it.
Or maybe it was just me.
Every breath shattered me a bit more, reminding me I was alive and Geryll was not. Yet the sensation felt foreign and strange, as if it stuck at weird angles underneath my skin.
With Ryker so close, it was impossible to know where my own grief ended and his began.
But I’d only known Geryll for a few months.
Ryker had known him all his life and had been guiding him for years.
I didn’t know how he was still standing from all the pain and guilt pulsing through him, palpable even from beyond the washroom door.
My washroom door.
After we’d stopped crying, we’d made our way up the stairs, no words exchanged. Ryker had raised his hand to open his own bedroom door, but he’d frozen at the last moment.
I hadn’t asked what memories had stilled him; how many cups of tea had been drunk there.
I’d taken him into my room.
Now I sat on my bed, exhausted in my own sorrow, looking at Geryll’s shield. Ryker had placed it gently on top of the table, like a precious heirloom, too pure to touch the floor. It sat on top of the papers and journals, as if they all wanted to drive us insane.
Geryll was so young. In age and in heart.
He’d lived his short life under the world’s pressure and it had finally caught up to him. And Nadya–
The water stopped flowing.
I stood up straighter as Ryker appeared in the threshold, eyes still downcast, like he’d only had enough energy to open the door, not actually pass through it.
In the past, he’d filled up the doorways he loved so much, always making an entrance, always catching my eye. Now, he leaned on the wood as if he needed it to stand.
Neither of us moved or spoke, like we were forever frozen.
I watched him, this man who’d held an entire Clan in his hand and now commanded an ever bigger army, completely drained and done with everything.
I recognized that stillness.
It was the same one which had kept me in bed all those weeks ago. Back then, Ryker had given me a bow to try and yank me back to normalcy.
It was my turn to pull him away from the darkness I already felt forming.
