Page 107 of Realm of Dreams & Shadows

I swallow the giant lump that has formed in my throat. “You said it was your duty. What is? To whom do you owe it?”

For a moment, he says nothing.

“Dammit, Chase, just fucking tell me!”

“The Emperor.” His voice is so low it’s almost inaudible. “After the Breaking, he summoned me to his deathbed. He was in the throes of a vision, and he told me what I had to do in order to keep the barriers up and the world safe from Adric and those like him who were too foolish to understand or too malevolent to care.”

“He told you to kill off his daughters and granddaughters and nieces and all of them?”

“He said it had been his holy duty to protect the realms—to protect existence itself. And now that duty fell upon me. He told me that no marriage between the Nightmare King and any woman of Imperial lineage could ever be consummated.”

“But why? Wouldn’t he want more heirs? I thought royalty was all about the heirs.”

He drags his fingers through his hair, making the copper highlights flash in the moonlight. “Dammit, you already know. Because consummation would bring down the barriers. And if the barriers fell, then chaos would reign. And while the Nightmare creatures and some of the denizens of other realms might survive, every living creature in the Realm of the Real would surely die.”

“I still don’t understand why consummating a marriage would destroy the world.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I asked, but he was already too far gone. He just held my hand, and as life slipped from him, he told me to remember the warning.”

The words seem to hang in the air, like something from a Hollywood disaster film. It can’t be true. Except it is. I’ve seen enough now to know that it is.

“And I’m descended from the Emperor,” I say. “My mother too,” I add, not looking at him but at the writing on the tree. The proof—if I still needed it—that this man killed my mother.

Imperial blood. An impossible fate. And the man I love with a blade aimed at my heart.

How? How can this possibly be my life?

“Cora.” His voice is so soft I almost don’t hear it, but I do, and I swallow, then lift my chin, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Promise to light a candle on my birthday,” I say. “And tell Tia the truth. Help her get her magic back. She—she can help you.” I can barely speak, my throat too thick with my tears. And I definitely can’t look at his face.

I close my eyes and whisper, “Make it fast.”

Then I bend my head and wait for death to take me.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

I’m numb as I walk back down Aviles Street. Numb and confused and horrified. It’s all such a big jumble in my head that I can’t even sort out my feelings. A thick mist blankets the street, matching my mood and making this already eerie walk even more so.

He killed her. He killed them all.

How can those words even exist in my head? More importantly, how can they be tied to Chase, the man—being? Monster?—who I thought I knew.

Who I thought I loved.

I drag my fingers through my mist-damp hair, wanting other thoughts in my head. Not these horrors that are circling around and around, making me feel like the world’s slowed down to half-speed, and now I’m feeling every nanosecond of lingering misery.

I move at a steady pace, as if my speed is the only thing I have control over. Hell, maybe it is. The stones under my shoes are slick with mist, the air warm and wet and wrong in my lungs. Night presses close. I keep moving because stopping means thinking and thinking means I might have to finally let my heart in on what my head already knows.

All those Brides. All those names on all those trees.

All dead because of him.

Because of Chase.

A shiver runs up my spine.

Stop it. Just stop thinking.