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He didn’t want to rule the world. He only wanted to save it.
It was cowardice, he knew, but cowardice came so much easier than hope.
It had been summer, and they’d been lying in bed, bodies tangled and warm. He’d drawn a hand along Rhy’s perfect skin, and when the prince had preened, he’d said, “One day you will be old and wrinkled, and I will still love you.”
“I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry. But I’m here now, so you can’t die,” he said, his voice finally breaking. “Don’t you see how rude that would be, when I’ve come so far?”
She tried not to think about what it meant, how much farther she would have to go, how many people she’d have to fight, to find him.
“Are you strong enough to win?” she asked. Was he? This wasn’t a tournament magician. Wasn’t even a sliver of magic like Vitari. Osaron had destroyed an entire world. Changed another on a whim. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. Lila flashed a glimmer of a smile, sharp as glass. “Good,” she answered, pushing open the door. “Only fools are certain.”
“Lila,” he’d said, and she’d expected him to chastise her, to order her back to the palace, but he’d only caught her by the arm and said, “Be careful.” Tipped his forehead against hers and added, almost too low to be heard, “Please.” She’d seen so many versions of him in the past few hours. The broken boy. The grieving brother. The determined prince. This Kell was none of those and all of them, and when he kissed her, she tasted pain and fear and desperate hope.
“Life isn’t made of choices,” said Holland. “It’s made of trades. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have a cost.”
“Hatred is a powerful thing,” continued Holland through gritted teeth. “Hold on to it.”
She forgave him nothing. She owed him everything.
You wanted him to kill for me, die for me, protect me at all costs. Well, Mother, you got your wish. You simply failed to realize that that kind of love, that bond, it goes both ways. I would kill for him, and I would die for him, and I will protect him however I am able, from Faro and Vesk, from White London, and Black London, and from you.”
“Sleep is for the rich and the bored,” she’d said. “I am neither, and I know my limits.”
She’d brushed him off, though in truth she was tired in a way she’d rarely known, a tired that went down far past skin and muscle and even bone, dragged its fingers through her mind until everything rippled and blurred. A tired that made it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to be.
“Scars are not shameful,” said Ojka, “not unless you let them be.”
Kell’s grip tightened, as if he thought she would disappear, but Lila wasn’t going anywhere. She could have walked away from almost anything, but she wouldn’t have walked away from this. And that itself was terrifying—but she didn’t stop, and neither did he.
Anisa curled in toward him, then, the way she used to when he told her tales. A flower to the sun, that’s what their mother used to say. Their mother, who’d died so long ago, and taken most of the light with her.
“Death comes for us all,” said Holland evenly. “I would simply have mine mean something.”
“Then why are you here?” “Because good people die, and bad people live, and it doesn’t seem very fair, does it, Holland?”
“It does nothing to dwell on what’s been taken from you,” he snarled. “Nothing.”
And it wasn’t fair—he shouldn’t have to choose—she should have come to him a dozen times, should have listened, should have, should have, but he was tired, and she was sorry, and in that moment, it was enough.
“I was in love once,” she added, as if it were an afterthought. “His name was Vik. I loved him the way the moon loves the stars—that is what we say, when a person fills the world with light.”
“And the idea of you walking away again, vanishing from my life, that terrifies me most of all.”
At last, he said, “It’s too easy.” “Killing? Of course it is,” said Vortalis. “Living with it, that’s the hard part.
“Do you ever get tired of running, Bard?” She cocked her head. “No.” Alucard’s gaze went to the horizon. “Then you haven’t left enough behind.”
There was an undeniable charm about the man, not merely the youthful airs of one who hadn’t seen the worst the world has to offer, but the blaze of someone who managed to believe in change, in spite of it.
“Love and loss,” he said, “are like a ship and the sea. They rise together. The more we love, the more we have to lose. But the only way to avoid loss is to avoid love. And what a sad world that would be.”
And then his arms were folding around her, and in that small gesture, she understood, felt it down to her bones, that draw, not the electric pulse of power but the thing beneath it, the weight she’d never understood. In a world where everything rocked and swayed and fell away, this was solid ground. Safe. Her heart was beating hard against her ribs, some primal part of her saying run, and she was running, just not away. She was tired of running away. So she was running into Kell. And he caught her.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said again, lifting her blade to Jasta’s throat. “And maybe you’re wrong. We don’t choose what we are, but we choose what we do.”
In the last few months, he had become intimately acquainted with pain, and with death, but grief was new. Pain was bright, and death was dark, but grief was grey. A slab of stone resting on his chest. A toxic cloud stripping him of breath.
Then he remembered: there was no one else—and there it was again, worse than a knife, the sudden assault of memory, a raw wound reopened.
how funny alucard... i, too, am in love w rhy??
But what they’d had—it was more than stolen kisses between silk sheets, more than secrets shared only by starlight, more than a youthful dalliance, a summer fling. And Alucard was here to prove it. To lay his heart bare before Rhy, and the Rose Hall, and the rest of London.
I have lost my mother, and my father. I have lost friends, and strangers who might one day have been friends. I have lost too many of my people to count. And I will not suffer losing you.”
It ends, he thought—no fear, only relief, and sadness. He had tried. Had given everything he could. But he was so tired.
she seemed to hold the world in her hands. Maybe she did. After all, she’d already taken two Londons as her own. She was a thief, a runaway, a pirate, a magician. She was fierce, and powerful, and terrifying. She was still a mystery. And he loved her.
