Chapter 929
Then a blur of motion. A girl. She was tiny, with hair like tangled spun gold and knees scuffed with dirt. She wore the same grey uniform as everyone else, but she wore it like armor. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She picked up a rock the size of her fist and launched herself at the leader.
She fought like a wildcat — biting, scratching, swinging the rock until the boys fled, terrified of her madness.
She stood over Julian, panting, wiping a smear of blood from her cheek. Then she reached into her pocket and produced half a bread roll stolen from the cafeteria. It was squashed and still warm.
“Eat,” she commanded. Her eyes burned with a fire that would one day consume cities. “If you eat, you don’t hurt.”
The scene shifted. The colors bled away.
Five years ago. A church. Skye, in a wedding dress that looked like a shroud, walking down the aisle toward Liam Kensington.
Julian sat in the back pew, hidden in the shadows. He wanted to stand up. He wanted to shout: He doesn’t love you. I do. I always have. But he couldn’t. His phone buzzed in his pocket. A message from his father: Interfere, and she dies.
So he watched. He watched her say “I do” to a man who saw her as an acquisition. He watched the light in her eyes flicker and die.
The scene shifted again. The operating table. The flatline. The day Skye died in her first life.
Julian was screaming, but no sound came out. He was behind a glass wall, beating his fists against it until they bled. He watched her take her last breath. He saw the loneliness carved into her face.
Julian sat bolt upright in bed, gasping. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The scream had been real this time.
𝖬𝘰𝗿𝖾 𝘯𝗈v𝖾𝘭𝘀 o𝗻 g𝘢𝗅𝗻𝗼𝘃еl𝘀.𝖼о𝗆
He clutched his chest, the phantom pain of the poison gas tangled with the agony of the memory. He fumbled for the glass of water on his nightstand, his hands shaking so badly the water sloshed over the rim.
He needed air.
He threw off the covers and limped to the balcony doors, shoved them open, and stepped out into the storm. The cold rain struck his face and shocked him back to the present.
He gripped the stone railing and looked out over the garden.
A light was on in the guest wing.
Julian went still. Skye’s room.
She was standing on her balcony, sheltered under the overhang. She wore a silk robe, her arms wrapped around herself against the chill, looking out at the rain with a lost expression.
She looked up and saw him.
For a moment, time stopped. The distance between the two balconies felt like an ocean, yet unbearably intimate.
Skye didn’t wave. She didn’t speak. She simply looked at him.
Julian felt a desperate urge to bridge the gap. To tell her everything. I was the boy in the mud. You saved me. We were the discarded children of Blackwood. And I have spent every day since then trying to become strong enough to save you back.