Page 70 of Reflections of Silence

Not Minette.

I didn’t know whose thought it was, or if the grief that broke apart in my heart was mine or someone else’s. The howl that reverberated inside my ears came from the man at my side.

Oh, Minette. He loved you, too.

My breath wheezed in my chest, and smoke and shadows became one.

“Gella.” Sebastian’s dark eyes peered in at me as though from a distance. His hair hung around his face, dark shadows smudging around his neck and shirt. His coat was nowhere to be seen. He stroked my cheek with ash smudged fingers. “Can you breathe?”

“I wouldn't be sitting up if I couldn't,” I gasped, then hacked as my lungs jumped into my throat. Salty tears ran fresh down my cheeks, and God alone knew how I looked. “Wait. Minette—I found her?—”

I hacked again, unable to get a full breath in, my throat raw beneath the strain of the smoke, barely recovered from the previous injury, though that no longer seemed important. His arms wound tight around me, crushing me to his chest as he turned, placing me with gentle hands on the ground at Minette’s side.

Pale curls stained red framed my maid’s face. A slash decorated her throat in a gruesome parody of a necklace, the edges darkened as though burned. I knew if I checked Amy’s monstrous hands where she had turned her fingers into talons, I would find the same strange burns there too. Shards of crystal from the champagne glasses lodged deep in Minette’s serene face. No new blood ran from her wounds, her body as still as Sebastian’s at daybreak.

Dolion knelt beside her, his hand hovering over her chest, unmoving. Every inch of him had turned to stone, his expression untwisted and so much more…human.

“Dolion?” I whispered, reaching for him, but Sebastian caught my hand, drawing me back.

“Leave him be,” he murmured into my hair as my heart wrenched for the tiny maid who had saved us all. “We will see if he returns to us.”

“Returns?” I couldn’t tear my eyes from their twin still forms.

“Without a heart, a gargoyle won’t live. His is broken. We will see if he can… mend.” Sebastian’s voice took on a deep timbre, and I realized I wasn’t the only one grieving the loss of a dear friend. His was a poor explanation of the stone man’s grief, but I understood what Sebastian was saying.

I blinked back another cascade of tears but had little control over them. As the drive cleared of bodies, my mind began to take stock. “Where is Amy?”

“The remaining wolves took her. Payment. For Granny Smythe.”

“Oh. It’s done.”

He had said so before, when I’d asked but nothing from then had sunk in. Reality turned with the death of a loved one, reorganizing my perceptions of what was important. It felt as though this should be a big moment, but instead, I was numb.

As I had been when this all started.

Empty.

I stared at the house, no more than a charred skeleton against a muted sky. The back of the building appeared to have collapsed altogether. I swayed in Sebastian’s arms, lacking the energy to ask anything more.

Charleton crouched before me, proffering a square of clean cloth that looked as though it might have been torn from the inside of his jacket. I took it gratefully, unable to give him even the faintest smile in thanks.

“Was this all worth it?” I whispered hoarsely.

Charleton looked at my maid and Dolion for a long moment. Then he knelt, his arms sliding beneath Minette’s empty form. When I thought he might lift her body and take her to be buried somewhere, he shifted her closer to Dolion, tucking her against him in a cold, lifeless embrace. Then he stood. Shoulders bowed, he took a silent moment of respect and retreated toward the broken house.

Somehow, Charleton’s silence meant more than anything else that had happened.

Sebastian traced beneath my lashes, his lips following his fingers with gentle kisses. “We don’t always have choices, Gella. But the ones we get, we make the most of.”

He swept his arms beneath me, carrying me across the drive to the garden, and placed me on the lawn. Wrapping his jacket around my shoulders, he left me to watch over our friends as he headed inside the remnants of the house where the stone foundations hadn’t burned, returning with Charleton and a few other townsmen I didn’t recognize. They spoke quietly and began to clean up the broken bodies of a witch and the people who detested her in death almost as much as they had in life.

I knew then that what we had forged together through magic and love would last forever. I would have given up the sun for the monster who loved me back, but he wasn’t that sort of manhe had become. I was far from the displaced orphan who had mounted the docks in New Orleans so many weeks ago, thrust into an uncertain life where worries of love were the farthest thing from my mind. In Sebastian I had discovered acceptance, endurance and adoration.

In him, I found family.

EPILOGUE

GISELLA

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