Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)

I had heard it every night in the false T?uhas I had been plagued with. I had grown used to the pain of hearing it there, but here?

My magic shifted at the sound, and then Ryland’s yell erupted before I could slide the powerful wall back into place, only to have the laugh come again.

My head snapped toward the sound, part of me expecting to see her lying next to Ryland, to see the blood slither down her face the way it had in the last moment of her life.

However, it was only Ryland. Only Ryland and the sound of my child that seemed to be coming from inside of him. No, not inside of him. The sound was clearly in my head … but how?

I stared at Ryland as he calmed, his bright blue eyes shifting to look at me in thanks. That was not what I saw, though. I only heard the laugh as I stared, unfocused, at the boy before me, my magic swelling again as I tried to understand what had happened.

“Mommy.” Her voice was clear. It was calm. It was beautiful.

I couldn’t stop the jerk. I couldn’t stop the way my magic flared, and my heart crashed inside of me, a pain I had thought I had escaped coming to rip me in two jagged pieces.

I tried to move away from the sound, from the voices, but Ryland’s hand was like a vice around mine. No matter how hard I pulled, he wouldn’t let me go. It was no longer Ryland we needed to be concerned about. It was me.

As tears trailed down my face, and my magic caught fire to the floor, long flames licking over the surface in twisting snakes as if there was a trail of gasoline there, I tried to keep the sobs trapped inside of me. They came, anyway, loud and angry as I tried to escape the vice of Ryland’s hand, tried to escape the voice that came again and again.

“Mommy.”

My focus snapped to Ryland, ready to yell at him to release me, to let me run as far away from here as possible. However, the look in his eyes stopped me. The calm that I didn’t think I had ever seen from him, the plea for help, for understanding, clear without him so much as saying anything.

It froze me.

“Take it out,” he moaned, his voice a hollow echo in my ears as Rosaline’s laugh filled my head. The words only confused me more until he tightened his hand around mine, his face trailing with fresh tears. “Take it out.”

With those three words, it all made sense. Those three words froze me.

The blade.

The blade that had been made from Rosaline’s soul… It couldn’t be.

I begged for it not to be, but after one look in his eyes, I knew. A piece was inside of him.

“Mommy?”

I cringed against the voice, the way it echoed in my head and pulled at my heart.

“Can you hear her, too?” I asked the question on instinct, but I knew at once he could not.

He only stared at me, the pain in his eyes for another reason.

I closed my eyes, embracing the blackness behind my lids as a high-pitched scream echoed from outside, the sound followed almost instantly by the laugh of the child I still mourned.

From the moment Edmund had destroyed her life, I had vowed to ruin the monstrous man. I had vowed to release Rosy from the prison she had been entombed within. Inches away from me was the first piece to that debilitating task that I had embarked on.

There wasn’t any question about what I was supposed to do. There never had been.

From the moment her laugh had filled my head, I would have moved mountains to help her, despite the pain.

It just so happened that this mountain involved cutting open an innocent boy’s heart and miraculously putting it back together again before his magic died, taking him with it.

I had removed hearts for centuries, keeping them beating for Edmund’s use, keeping the magic alive so he could devour it. Given that, this should be a simple task, like breaking into a Pink Floyd concert.

Yeah, I got this.

I didn’t even look at him as I put him to sleep. I heard his head hit the floor with a painfully loud beat as a held breath seeped from his now relaxed lips, and then I went to work.

His chest was riddled with the same scars I had seen in the dungeon, the same scar that moved through my hand. Line after line, one over the other as the blade had been plunged into him again and again.

Scars that would never fully heal, that would only serve as a reminder of what he had been forced to do. Scars inside and out. The thought disgusted me. Even with my inner knowledge of how Edmund worked and how he used his children, this was crossing a line. Ryland’s life had been stolen before it had even had a chance to begin.

I wanted to find a way to give that back to him.

I would start with this.

“Mommy?”

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