Page 343 of Alchemised
“Lila—she thought he was me—”
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else she could say.
His jaw trembled. “Don’t tell her.”
“You’re not going to die, Luc.”
Her mind felt as if it were about to rip in two from the effort of keeping Cetus subdued.
She could barely see straight.
“You have a chance. Kill him. No one else can—”
“No—”
There was a knife in Luc’s hand. She saw it too late.
She was so focused on keeping Cetus back, she’d let the paralysis slip.
She didn’t think.
She blocked it on instinct and completed the parry exactly the way Kaine had taught her to: a quick sweep of her knife, so fast it knocked the blade from his fingers. In the same motion, the obsidian knife sank to the hilt into the left side of Luc’s chest, in the place under the arm where the armour was weak.
He gave a guttural gasp, body seizing uncontrollably. Helena gave a panicked scream as he collapsed in her arms.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said.
She ripped the knife out, wrenching his armour out of the way with her resonance, trying to reach the wound.
“No! No, no. Don’t do this to me. Luc, don’t.” She closed the wound as quickly as she could. It only took seconds to stop the bleeding and repair the place where her knife had sliced the aorta.
Fingers clamped around her throat, digging into her trachea, and she looked into Cetus’s expression of pure hatred.
“You stupid—bitch,” he said as she felt a quick pulse of that dead energy.
Luc’s face cleared as he gave a gasp of relief.
“Got him,” Luc said, letting go of her, forcing a smile.
Before Helena could speak, there was a hard knock on the door. “Principate, are you all right?”
Helena expected the door to burst open, for the room to fill with soldiers who’d find her kneeling over Luc with a bloody knife while Sebastian lay slaughtered beside them.
“I’m fine,” Luc immediately called, his voice straining. “Be out soon.”
The footsteps retreated, but Luc wasn’t fine.
Helena had closed the wound, there was nothing physically wrong with him, but she knelt there and felt that he was dying. It was happening slowly. Not a sudden cold pulse, but as if he were bleeding to death, his vitality slipping out rather than blood.
There was no cause for it, nothing to fix, but she felt it through her resonance. As though he were unravelling.
“What’s happening?” Her fingers scrabbled, trying to find a way to fix it, but she had never encountered a death like this.
His hand closed over hers, squeezing tight enough to stop her resonance. “It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, trying to pull her hands free. “I can figure this out. But if you’d given me time—I would’ve—”
“I died months ago, Hel—” he said, his breathing forced.
