Page 33 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

That godsdamned nickname?

An order.

To reassemble. To put right the broken, bone-wrong pieces they’d shattered while demanding information she would die before divulging.

The ice didn’t melt.

It remained a wall between me and the body I’d memorized.

The shattered bones.

The flesh burned clean away.

The collar around her slender neck.

The skin clinging to her frame in all the wrong ways. Without her magic, she couldn’t heal. Without her magic, they were starving her like a mortal. It carved hollows beneath her collarbones. Bruises beneath the eyes staring unseeingly toward the ceiling. Harsh lines across a face I’d thought impossibly beautiful only months before.

Vacant—this vessel.

Death’s angel looked primed to meet him, if only her stilted breaths would cease lifting her ribs.

“Sunspot.”

“Leave us.”

It was supposed to be an order. A command. But my voice carried too little volume to qualify. Cracked and broken.

Still, he did.

He always did, though his shoulders no longer stiffened while doing it.

I laid my palm across her sternum and closed my eyes as my magic sensed the fractures within it. The wounds compromising her vital organs.

Wrong.

This was so wrong.

As healers, we vowed to do no harm. But…

To heal a soul in splinters, knowing they’d return to inflict more pain, more breaking, until nothing remained…

That complicity felt nearly as cruel as the bastards doing the breaking.

Swallowing hard, I forced myself to do what I’d refused to for weeks—to truly look at Alvara Porter. Or… what remained of her.

The skin Magnolia had allegedly wiped clean during her explosion of grief was now mottled with bruises, deep gashes, and burns—third-degree, if my eyes served me well.

The witch’s mark now branded her chest. I could set it right, but I’d learned the hard way that Moros would repeat the insult and force me to watch her writhe and scream beneath an iron he wielded with a smile.

Empty—those eyes, that face.

The lights were on, but no one was home. With reaper’s venom burning through her overworked veins, the great Seer of the North wasn’t safe within the other.

She was inside her own ice, buried somewhere the pain couldn’t reach her.

Maybe hers was an inferno. The flames that had kept her warm for so long.

With a snap of my magic, I could end this.