Page 95 of The Fallen Kingdom

“What made you change your mind?”

“I hoped you would ask me to stay in Edinburgh. You didn’t.”

Gavin never would have gone to Oxford and caught that illness. He never would have died and come back with the Sight and I wouldn’t have gone to that ball at the Assembly Rooms as a debutante. Maybe my mother wouldn’t have been murdered that night. Maybe that one decision would have changed everything.

“So you left?” My smile is small, sad. “You didn’t stop to think about how I was a sixteen-year-old girl, still giddy from her first kiss, and too terrified to sayI love you?”

I’m still too terrified to say those words. Some things don’t change.

“I was your first kiss?”

“Of course you were my first. I waited years for that kiss.”

“I would have waited years to marry you,” Gavin tells me. “I wanted to, long before we were forced into an engagement. If you wanted me, too. Not that it matters now.”

I stare at the scars on his cheek, at the one along his collarbone. “I suppose nothing worked out the way we hoped, did it?”

“Never in a thousand years.” His smile is quick, forced. “But I like to think if things had been different, we would have been happy. Don’t you?”

When I imagine all that could have been, my mind comes up empty. My life has become so entwined with this war that anything else seems more dream than reality. I barely remember the girl I was.

I look down at my hands. Catherine washed the blood off, but I can still see it dried beneath my fingernails. Now that I think about it, my nails are hardly ever clean. They’re always a reminder of all the fae I’ve killed.

I’m a creature of chaos and death and maybe this is how I’m meant to die. In a battle. At the end of a long war.

If things had been different and Kiaran had never come into my life, maybe I would have married Gavin. Maybe we could have been happy living in Edinburgh with our children.

“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “But I like to think so.”

He stares down at his hands, too, as if he were thinking the same things I was. “If we manage to survive this, what will you and Kiaran do?”

Kiaran will be with Sorcha. She’ll spend the next thousand years chipping away at pieces of his soul until there’s nothing left of the Kiaran I know. An eternity of servitude given to her so I can have a book—a book that my friend lost his life for.

“I haven’t thought about it,” I lie.

“Aileana.” He sucks in a breath to say something else, but I interrupt him.

“I’m dying.” The words leave my mouth in a rush of breath. “I’m dying,” I say again, lower this time. “Every time I use my powers, it kills me a little more. So I can’t think about anything else. I have to find the Book, or—”

Something makes me look up to the dark line of trees. It’s Kiaran.

His eyes meet mine, and I know he heard everything.

CHAPTER 42

IPUSH TOmy feet. “MacKay. Wait—”

He doesn’t look back at me as he turns and walks off into the woods.

I hurry after him. “Damn it, MacKay,stop.” When the stubborn arse keeps walking, I say, “You can’t go much farther unless you want to fall off a bloody cliff, so stop being a coward and talk to me.”

That does the trick. Kiaran pauses, his back to me. “What do you want, Kam?”

I say the first thing that comes to mind: “I was going to tell you.”

“When?” Kiaran turns. His face is so shadowed that I can’t make out his expression. “When?” At my silence, he says bitterly, “Let me guess: as your last words?”

His lilac irises are blazing in the darkness. For a moment I can’t help but recall the Morrigan’s blue eyes. I’m assaulted by memories of Kiaran snatching Derrick out of the air to crush him. Like he was a dragonfly. A bug. A pest.

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