Page 246 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
There.
At the corner of the tavern stood Kase, his curls windswept and messy, his eyes shining so brightly they burned like new stars. Even with the thirty feet and people between them, he was the clearest thing she could see.
He was here.
She zagged in and out of the crowd, some joining the line to speak with her brother. She forgot about Navara and focused solely on reaching him.
And then she was in his arms. They crushed her to him. She still couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t care.
He’d found her. Even here in the realm of souls, he’d kept his promise.
Chapter 48
TUCKED AWAY
Jove
JOVE’S CHEST WAS HEAVY, TOO heavy. He didn’t know what to do with himself, but he needed to do something. If he stopped moving, he would drown.
The ropy, glowing Gate disappeared in a blink, and the tunnel was thrust into darkness. Kase had vanished as if he never was.
Harlan Shackley, the Stradat Lord Kapitan, his father, was dead.
He’d died.
The word sounded harsh even in Jove’s head, so final, so cruel as if the word itself had dealt the killing blow. It tasted sour, like spoiled wine.
He half believed that any minute now, his father would stride around the corner and demand that they stop wasting time, or shout at him for doing nothing to stop his death or fornot stopping Kase from leaving. But his father would never do any of that again.
The world felt muffled, like his ears were stuffed with cotton. He held his mother tighter as her tears fell.
Formidable,his father had murmured among his final words—yet she felt so fragile and small in his arms, too light, a wisp that would scatter in the wind.
Now they very well might lose Kase too, and in the end, his father’s sacrifice would be in vain.
Sacrifice. Would he have done it for Jove?
He stared at his father’s closed, lifeless eyes, trying his best to not look at the grotesque wound in his chest.
He swallowed hard.
Jove needed to be strong. Whether he liked it or not, he was now the head of the Shackley family, and it was up to him to protect it.
While he’d never agreed with his father’s methods, he could appreciate the strength he radiated. If Jove could admire one singular thing about his father, it was that Harlan hadn’t broken despite his world crumbling for the third time in his life these past few months.
How would Jove have fared if he’d been in his father’s shoes? Considering he’d barely felt alive these last few months in his own, he doubted he would’ve survived. How had his mother made it? How had she kept functioning through each heartache life dealt her?
What did true strength look like?
War was here,hadbeenhere for some time; in fact, he wasn’t sure it had ever ended fifteen years ago. But he couldn’t change that. They would lose today without whatever strength he could scrounge together.
Clara and Samuel’s faces flashed in his mind’s eye. They were somewhere above, and they needed his protection.
He needed to step into the shoes his father left behind. They wouldn’t fit, but they didn’t need to—Jove would make them his own.
“I need to speak with Lord Stephenson and the others,” Jove whispered into his mother’s hair. “This isn’t over.”
The weight on his chest never lifted, but he rose anyway.
