Goldfinch (The Plated Prisoner, #6)

by Raven Kennedy

“I knew you were my pair even without your aura.” Her brow furrows and she blinks slowly, like she’s trying to hold on to my words. Trying to hold on to her life. And I need her to, because I fucking need her. “I knew you were mine the second I laid eyes on you. Because someone told me. Someone who hasn’t spoken to me ever since,” I explain, my confession rattled and grieved. “One word. One single word. Spoken from the lips…of my mother.” Auren’s eyes widen ever so slightly. When I ripped the world and brought my mother with me to Orea, I think I tore her in half just as much as I tore myself. Because she stopped speaking. Her voice went mostly mute. Her mind, mostly muddled. But it was there and then, beside a poisoned rip, in a foreign cave, where she said the last word she’s ever spoken to me. Just one. I had been pressing a cool cloth to her fevered forehead, trying to care for her after how sick she became from traveling through the rip. When suddenly, her hand snatched out and gripped my wrist with surprising strength, fingernails digging into my skin. When I met her gaze, I saw how her green irises disappeared and were replaced with churning milky pools caught in a sightless stare. Saw an ancient scrawl drag across them, the language indecipherable, the size far too small. That milky gaze held me hostage, and then she opened her mouth and spoke a single word, in a voice that was not entirely her own. “Goldfinch.”