Mother of Death & Dawn (The War of Lost Hearts, #3)

by Carissa Broadbent

It was all anyone had ever wanted to do to me. What use was I, after all, but to be a weapon?

“Five hundred years is a very long time,” he said, at last. “One hundred and eighty thousand days, and I thought of you in every one.”

I looked at Max and saw the love of my life, but the person who traveled with me now was a stranger. He was close enough to touch and yet farther away than he had ever been.

It was so easy. I was already so close. It took just the slightest turn of my head to kiss him. It was not a kiss between strangers. It was a kiss that gave, and took, a thousand unspoken words. Slow—not frantic and messy, but languishing, desperate.

Tell me, my ashen son, do you know how much a million memories weigh? How about one? It weighs enough to break a spine. It weighs enough to break a soul.

How much does a memory weigh? Too much to carry alone. Tisaanah looked into my eyes and took my hands.

Time and place and space disappeared. We were a river stretching out in all directions. We were the bodies and breaths of the soldiers above. We were the sky and the ruins and the city of Niraja in the past and the present. We were ourselves as we were ten years ago, lost, alone, and as we were now—found, together. We Wielded the core of power like snatching a burning star from the sky.

I pulled her closer—still not close enough. She tasted like home. Like everything good about reclaiming where I had been.

The one upside, perhaps, to being a king would be the ability to make Tisaanah a queen.

“You are my home, Max. I never allowed myself to believe I would ever have one. I never allowed myself to think that I could keep one, if I did. But I have realized that there is bravery in hope for the future. And I—” Max’s kiss, sudden and passionate, swallowed the rest of my words.

When we parted, our foreheads pressed together, he murmured, “You cannot possibly understand how much I love you.”

All this time, I felt that death circled me like a lost lover. I had longed for it, loved it, lusted after it. Now my lover had become death, and all I craved was life.

It ends with two souls who create a future together.