Page 141 of A Reign of Roses
My mentor. My friend. The first person to show me how to truly be brave. The closest thing I’d ever had to a…
I couldn’t—
No, this couldn’t—
“Dagan, you have to listen to me, all right?” My hands continued to move over his chest. Sealing the wound, lacing the skin together, fusing his organs into place once more. “Nothing is going to happen to you. You are myfamily. Do you hear me? I am not going to leave you—”
“Arwen.” Griffin’s gutted voice behind me cracked my heart in two. “It’s too late.”
“Don’t say that, don’t—”
“He’s gone.”
“Please,” I cried. And cried and cried.
“Arwen,” he said again, with as much warmth as I’d ever heard in his voice. “He is. We need to run while we still can.”
My eyes, blurred with tears, found Griffin’s grim expression. I scanned the room. Empty save for bodies and debris and that crushed altar and an entire corner of the temple charred in black soot, where a fire had been narrowly extinguished. Below me— Horror clung to my fingers as I realized thecorpseI’d been rebuilding, as futile as plugging a hole in a sunken ship. His wrinkled, slack face. Vacant, unmoving eyes.
And his hand in mine…just flesh. “I’m so sorry, Dagan…” I’d not been fast enough. I’d not—
I collapsed on top of him as I wept. Pepper and mothballs and the iron-rich tang of fresh blood filled my nose.
Griffin’s broad hands encircled my upper arms and lifted me off him. “Come on,” Griffin said.
“We can’t leave him!”
“All right,” the commander conceded. “All right.”
He released me and I fought the indescribable urge to fall back down to the soiled stone floor of the chapel. To stay there and never get up.
The clear winter day shone through where the tower had been destroyed. No Kane. No Lazarus.
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we need to move.”
Dagan had given his life for Ryder and Beth and Leigh…
“Arwen,” Griffin said once more. When I looked over, he was carrying Dagan’s lifeless body with little effort. “We have to keep going.”
We hurtled down the dizzying stairs in a daze until we’d reached Shadowhold’s eastern courtyard.
I knew it made me weak but I couldn’t stomach the bodies that littered the snow-tufted grass. Not just our soldiers, butinnocents. Nobles and friends who’d been in that temple to celebrate our wedding. Tossed from those gothic stained-glass windows like stale bathwater. Or maybe they’d jumped to avoid a more gruesome death at a harpy’s claws.
We’d failed them either way.
I had.
We made it inside with a handful of other soldiers and residents of the keep, and while Griffin kept moving—giving Dagan’s body to a cluster of soldiers, commanding his generals, his lieutenants—I stood by the castle’s heavy stone doors.
Ushering terrified faces inside, calling to those still in the barracks or the cottages.
Where had all the mercenaries gone? The snow-topped tents and iron gates of the keep were silent. Empty, as everyone had been ushered inside.
I stood on shifting feet, waiting for Kane.
“He’ll come,” a sleek voice said.
