Page 117 of Brutal Birthright

Fate could be fucking damned right now if he’d allow either of them to be harmed.

“You knew.” Fiadh finally spoke. Her voice sounded hollow and filled with an ancient malice.

Brigid nodded. Her pointed chin and dancing eyes tilted upwards to hold her gaze. “I did.”

“All this fucking time?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t deny it?” Fiadh’s voice shook with fury. The dark magic running through her veins made an ominous crackle in the air, and the entity under her control began to coalesce at her back like a pulsing shadow.

“I knew everything. Saw everything.” Brigid shrugged and rearranged herself to sit cross-legged. As a Seer, she was gifted with knowledge of all permutations of the future, but even in this moment, he couldn’t fathom how she could be so calm.

Not when there was a fucking battle going on behind them and a deranged woman intent on revenge standing before them.

Rowan’s fingers dug into the dirt. Trying to anchor himself. His mind raced to try and figure out a way out of this but came up empty-handed every time. There was a very real possibility they all might die here today.

He didn’t fear death, but knowing that he might fail in the only thing that mattered—protecting Oriana—that made his blood surge with violence.

A need to protect her that was so utterly all-consuming he practically crawled out of his skin.

“I’ll strike a bargain with you, Rowan.” As if Fiadh heard his thoughts, she turned to him now. “One last call for your services as the warlord, then you will be free to live the remainder of your immortal life in the peace you so desperately crave.”

“Fuck you.” He spat in the dirt. “The girl goes free. You have Brigid here, and she has nothing to do with any of this.”

“Your services,” Fiadh demanded as she gripped Oriana’s body with any surge of magic that made her cry in anguish.

He let out a warning growl. “Let her go unharmed, and you have my services.”

“Take Brigid’s head… and in return, you can have the girl alive.”

The world around him ground to a halt. Sounds and colours and senses all compressed into a bleak nothingness as her words registered in his mind. Echoing around in a spiral of miserable realisation that his prophecy was somehow real.

Unthinkably so.

He couldn’t speak, and his stomach caved as it threatened to hurl bile into the red dust. Why? Why him? What could this possibly be meant for, and what reason could the Goddesses fucking have for this kind of twisted eventuality?

Fingers lifted his chin, and Brigid’s piercing blue eyes met his own. A softness that wasn’t there before passed between them as she stared down at him with a quiet smile. “You’ve done it thousands of times before, no?”

In his dreams. She knew he’d gone through the motions over and over and over.

But that couldn’t be their fate.

It wasn’t possible.

“Don’t fear what comes next, brother. We’ve both seen it all. We know what is to come.”

Fuck this. No. He wasn’t going to accept that this was either of their destined paths. Rowan wanted to tear Fiadh apart. He wanted to save Brigid. He desperately needed to hold Oriana and feel her pulse softly thudding beneath his fingers.

White hot rage burned up the back of his throat, and just as he was about to argue that this was insanity or try and find a means of battling their way free of this torture, a sound like a thunderclap pounded down from above them.

The sky rained blackened shards, and everything in Rowan’s vision slid sideways as the explosion of potent magic roared with a terrifying release. Pinning his body flat to the ground with the force of whatever had consumed everything around them.

His ears were ringing, but he could move.

No longer restrained by Fiadh’s magic, he crawled through the dirt that hung thick and acrid in the air. Unable to see more than a foot in front of him after whatever had caused the explosion, he dragged himself on his belly the short distance to Oriana.

She was coughing on the red dust, with her skin and hair all coated in a thick layer. No doubt he was the same. His hands cupped her face, checking that she was truly here. Needing to feel her beneath his touch just to prove to himself this wasn’t an illusion.

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