Page 228 of Damsel in Disguise

I think of the promise a frightened twelve-year-old boy made beside a closed door by his mother’s lifeless body.

I think of all the years I convinced myself that I had abandoned that promise.

I was wrong. I simply forgot why I wanted to keep it.

Until Ariella reminded me of my purpose.

With no hesitation or emotion, I pull the trigger right on his face.

The first shot doesn’t even finish echoing through the laboratory before I’m pulling the trigger over and over again.

I keep firing until until there’s nothing left in front of me that resembles the man who built Triarch Dominion.

I keep pulling the trigger even though the barrel is sizzling and the bullets ran out.

Accepting that the gun is dead, I drop it aside with all the calmness. I only stop once I’ve made an ugly mess of his brains and blood, just like the failed Synthètes that I had to authorize to melt into a puddle of smashed flesh.

Silence detonates in the aftermath. The kind of silence that only arrives after an empire finally dies.

Slowly, I turn. My eyes immediately find those hazel orbs now rimmed red.

Ariella is alive, and crying.

I spent years believing I was incapable of feeling anything at all. Yet the only thought that survives the blood loss, the pain, and the destruction around me is the absurd relief that she is still standing there. Perfectly in one piece.

My mother wanted me to live.

The Dominion wanted me to survive.

That’s a difference I never understood until she happened. Until in this moments of finality, I look into those eyes.

A weak smile touches my lips before I can stop it. “Thank you, Ariella.”

The words are quieter than the silence surrounding us—save it for the dying sirens. But they are the truest thing I have ever said to anyone.

My legs finally surrender.

“Alastor!” somewhere in the distance I hear someone screaming.

My mother was the only person who ever pronounced my name that way.

For one impossible second, I almost believe she came back for me. Even if it’s the last beautiful dream I’ll ever get to see.

But the dream abandons me too, just like everybody else.

And I fall into the dark pit in peace knowing that the promise I made to her has finally been fulfilled.

63. ACCEPTANCE

ariella

The smell of a hospital room is always the same, no matter what part of the world you’re in. It’s a heavy chemical blanket designed to mask the lingering scent of mortality.

I’m seated in the hard plastic chair of the private clinic’s waiting room, staring blankly at the polished linoleum floor.

Through the small glass viewing square of the adjacent door, I can see Alistair.

He’s terrifyingly still, a map of clean white bandages wrapping around his ribs, his upper thigh and shoulders leave the fragments of the Triarch Dominion’s collapsing infrastructure had nearly torn him apart.