Page 154 of Glow of the Everflame

“Where is he?” I scanned the room, but everything was camouflaged under a blanket of wet, shimmering scarlet. “Where is my father?”

Luther set a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Diem. It’s too late.”

No.

“Where. Is. He?” I ground out, my fists clenching tight. “Where is my f—”

Then I saw him.

In the kitchen.

The last place I’d stood with him in this home. Where I’d screamed at him, insulted him, broken his heart. Where I’d told him he wasn’t my father, then left and never came back.

There he lay, in a lake of red, his body so terribly, impossibly still.

Dead.

My father was dead.

My father, who had taken me in when I was no one to him but someone else’s bastard child, and who had cherished me as the most precious jewel in his life.

My father, who taught me everything he knew. Who never saw me asweakbecause I was a girl, who taught me to embrace it as my strength.

My father, who had loved me unconditionally, even when I hadn’t deserved it.

Andrei Bellator, war hero, legendary Emarion Army Commander, Advisor to the Crown of Lumnos, beloved husband of Auralie, devoted father of Diem and Teller, wasdead.

A broken sob tore from my chest, a scream that was inhuman in its agony. Outside, Sorae roared into the sky, my grief consuming me so fully that it spilled across our bond and exploded into her. The house rattled with the force of our combined cries.

I staggered forward and crumpled to my knees at his side. His beautiful caramel-brown eyes were open and glassy. His mouth gaped in a permanent scream, his face forever frozen in a mask of disbelief.

I had never wanted to turn my healer’s mind off more than in this moment, but my training seized control against my will, cataloguing each injury.

His face was bruised, his lip and eyebrow split open, tissue under his nails, all suggesting a struggle. His throat had been slit, likely the wound that killed him. Puncture wounds littered his body, many of them bloodless, suggesting the murderer had continued to stab him long after his heart stopped beating.

Notjusta murder—a punishment.

A message.

For me.

The murder weapon was still lodged in his chest, its handle sticking straight up into the air. Between my trembling hands and the thick, syrupy blood coating my palms, I could barely pull it free.

It wobbled in my watery vision under the thunderstorm of tears I feared would never stop falling.

Even when they dried up, they would still be falling. Until my last breath, until I crossed into the afterworld and back into his open arms, they would forever be falling.

Luther knelt at my side. The sudden awareness of him broke through my fog. My eyes cleared for a moment, and I leaned in closer to examine the blade.

If the dark, smoky grey of Fortosian steel hadn’t marked it as a Descended weapon, the jewel-encrusted handle would have. The blackwood hilt was inlaid with copper scrollwork and pale pink gemstones that twinkled as the dagger quivered in my palms.

A violent, poisonous darkness infected my veins. I had once believed that, as a healer, I could never take a life. That seemed laughable now. Once I found the person responsible, I would doso much morethan simply take their life.

I would make them suffer in cruel, unimaginable ways. Make them beg me for mercy, and then make them beg me for death. I would make real every terror that haunted them, and when there was nothing left of them to wound, I would put them back together so I could do it all over again.

Devourer of Crowns. Ravager of Realms. Herald of Vengeance.

Fight.

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