Gold (The Plated Prisoner, #5)

by Raven Kennedy

So, yes, I was scared to fall. But without falling, I never would have landed. And what a beautiful thing it was to land.

It wraps around my body like threads of the sun. Like bands of steel. Like rays of warmth. Like streams of light. Like…

“You’re the Lyäri Ulvêre,” she says again, her voice choking up. My own voice pants out, my temples throbbing as my dizziness begins to tunnel through my spiraling mind. “I don’t understand…” A tear falls down her cheek, even as a smile tugs at her thin lips. “It means it’s alright, Lady Auren. Because you’re home.”

“We loyalists call you the Lyäri Ulvêre—the golden one gone. The gilded girl who was lost in the night.”

“We know you, Lady Auren, because we’ve been praying that one day, you would return. We know you, because you are the Turleys’ last-birthed heir.”

I love him with a fierceness that goes beyond the heart, and so I will ache and leak and grieve until he finds me. And he will find me. For now, I shut my eyes and think of him, letting my subconscious reach out with gentle fingers. Maybe somewhere in Orea, his eyes will close too. Maybe he’ll feel my pull, and we can meet in our dreams while we sleep. And maybe there, we can be home, for just a little while. Because my new home, I’ve realized…is him.

Hojat wants me to prepare myself. To say my goodbyes. But how am I supposed to see her through to her end when we barely got to start?

But time doesn’t fucking listen to me any more than the gods do. So I listen instead, because that’s all I can do. I listen to her every breath that gets harder and harder for her to take. I listen to all the things I never got to say. And I listen to my own goodbye that she’ll never get to fucking hear.