Page 125 of Fallen Heirs

I laughed and nuzzled his cheek.

Talon suddenly jumped on the bed. “So this is actually happening? The four of us are gonna do this?”

“Announce our love to the Realm, and then the world,” Xavier breathed in wonder.

Orpheus’ enthralling purple eyes burned into mine. “We’re doing it.”

“Come here,” I said, wrapping my arms around him and holding him tightly to me. “All of you.”

In the next second, we were all immersed in a heartfelt embrace.

“It will be okay. We’ll get through this and then our futures will be wide open to us,” I breathed against them.

In that moment, as I uttered the words, I truly believed in it, in every word I was saying.

I believed inus.

29

~Orpheus~

Alena was changing.

Settling.

Secure in herself.

Rising beyond what had happened to her.

She was finding the good in the present, focusing on the goodness in others too—the biggest example being my father—that big gentle heart of hers out in full, just like I’d seen from her when we’d first met, before this nightmare of a war had threatened to blacken that for her.

Despite it looking like things had been headed that way for a while, she’d fought against that happening, and she’d come back to herself.

In that way.

In others, though, she was evolving.

She was more sure of herself and her abilities than I’d ever seen from her before.

My father had told me how impressively she’d mastered herspecial ability,how she’d had to walk a dark line to do so and she’d just done it without a struggle.

She’d also been searching through her mother’s grimoires in a misguided, but sweet effort to save my mom, and she’d possessed confidence that she could perform the spell necessary. While, after Xavier had given me the disturbing details of such a spell, I’d nixed it, as had my father—rather emphatically at that—she’d also come up with a way to expel celestial magic from her. It was a hell of a spell to perform and not long ago, she would have balked at the mere thought of it. But not now. Now she was confident she could perform it, that she could handle itandthe extreme power it would take in order to carry it out.

I’d believed in her from the beginning, but seeing her come this far through every fucking nightmare that had come her way… it was something else entirely.

And recognizing that, my faith in her was why I was fighting against my protective instincts when it came to those I loved to not interfere right now.

A few minutes ago, my father and I had both received a notification from the alert we’d set up around Constantine’s cell that there’d been a disturbance, that somebody had gotten too close to the boundary—Talon’s phoenix fire.

I’d been withObsidianat the time working on some drills using theIlluminex Shieldsand the second it had happened, he’d teleported right beside me.

We’d headed off together and caught sight of Alena over there outside his cell.

The interference had actually been her clearing a path with her magic so she could open up a dialogue between them through the soundproofed nature of the cell.

“This is too dangerous,” my father spoke, stepping forward to intervene.

I threw out my arm, holding him back. “Give it some time.”

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