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but if you choose me, and I choose you, I think we’re strong enough to make it.”
His lips whispering perfect, beautiful, mine with every nip and caress. “Yours, always,” she’d promise.
She swallowed hard, looking down. “We don’t know how long I’ll…after everything. I need you to promise that if I’m not here, you’ll love her for me”—her voice cracked—“the way I would love her. She has to be that important to you. Do you promise?” Kaine had grown pale, but he nodded. “All right.” “Promise me.” “I promise.”
They were as bright silver as a lightning storm. Helena gave a sob and held her tighter. “Kaine—she has your eyes.”
“Helena.” His voice was strained. “I’m not supposed to have this life. Paladia is drowning in the blood I’ve spilled. You think that doesn’t include children? Killing is the only thing I’ve ever done well. Do you really want someone like that near your daughter?”
Enid Rose Ferron was, according to Lila, the easiest baby ever born.
“I’m going to kill Morrough,” Lila said. “I’m going to go in, and I’m going to kill him. And then I’m going to make sure that no one ever forgets about the Resistance.”
“I made an oath that I would die before I let Luc come to harm, but he died and I’m still here. I’ve tried to bear it, for Pol, but I can’t. Not anymore.”
And whenever you see Lumithia, that means I’m thinking about you, and when you see the sun shining, that’s your dad, watching you for me.” Lila’s eyes shone with tears. “And you’ll look out for Enid? She’s your best friend. You have to stick together, because that’s what best friends do.”
There was no denying Lila Bayard’s heroism. She had done what a dozen countries had failed to do.
“There’s no version of me that survived the war without Kaine. I was loyal to Luc, and I know you want Paladia to remember him, but that country killed him, as much as Morrough did. I can’t go back to it.”
“You’re all I have left besides Pol. I know you love Kaine, and he loves you, I don’t deny that. But I don’t think you realise how inhumanly cold he is to anyone who isn’t you or E. The rest of the world could burn and he wouldn’t care. I don’t think he’d even notice. Is this really what you want?” “I know what he’s like,” Helena said sharply. “It’s the reason you and I are alive.”
“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”
Four Years Later
Oh yeah here we go
“Pity someone didn’t kill her,” Kaine finally said. “Someone did,” Helena said in a voice that was almost a hiss. Kaine stared at her blankly. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”
“You lied to me. It was when we were at the ports, wasn’t it? When you said you had to go take care of some financial matter, but this is what you were doing. Now every time you go—anywhere—I’m going to wonder where you really are. And worry that you’re never going to come back to me—”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have looked. You should have left it alone.” She glared at him for a moment longer and then burst into tears. “I’m so glad she’s dead.”
“I hope she suffered, but I didn’t want it to be you—why is it always you?”
Ten Years Later
They stood, fingers entwined, as the last cloud of smoke from the steamship vanished. “It’s just the two of us now,” Helena said wistfully.
“So, what do we do now?” The corner of his mouth curved into a smile that had only ever been for her. “Anything. Whatever you want.”
Epilogue
Im so sad its over
A Comprehensive History of the Paladian Necromancy War by William Dover
About to get shot in the heart
and I thought I’d look up the section on the High Reeve.” The grin on Pol’s face vanished. “Don’t. They’re never going to tell it how it was.”
“What do you think the odds are that Mum’s even in the index?” Pol rested a hand on her wrist. “Don’t.”
“Someday…someone should set the record straight,” she said quietly.
Helena Marino. Marino left the city at the start of the Paladian Civil War to study healing. She survived the war but died during imprisonment prior to Liberation. She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.
OMG STOP IM CRYING EVEN THO I KNEW IT WAS COMING
