I nodded. “Yeah, when you were in the dungeon. You were talking about Mina.”
“I would go through every awful moment, every terrible mistake, and even this knife to the heart. I would gladly go through it all again, but not for Mina. But because it brought me here with you.”
A tear slid down my cheek. “Konstantin. There were better ways you could’ve ended up here.”
“Maybe,” he admitted, and his eyes started to close. “But I just wish I’d been deserving of your love.”
“You always were,” I told him, and a smile started to form on his lips before his last breath came out. I held him against me, crying onto his chest and wishing more than anything that I would hear his heart beat again. But it never did.
SEVENTY-NINE
d?dsfall
Bryn?” Ridley was calling my name from the stairs. I honestly didn’t know how long I had been kneeling there with Konstantin.
I blinked my eyes, feeling as if I’d just woken from a dream, and looked around at the disarray of the Queen’s chambers. A few feet away from me, Mina lay dead on the rug, which was now stained red. Her rabbit Vita hopped out from underneath the bed, inspecting the situation.
“Bryn?” Ridley yelled again and pushed open the bedroom door. “Holy shit.” He stepped into the room, his eyes fixed on the Queen’s body, and repeated, “Holy shit. She’s dead.”
Then he looked over at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” The tears had dried on my cheeks, and I nodded. “I’m okay. Konstantin is dead.”
“Yeah, I figured that.” Ridley moved carefully toward me. “Are you ready to let him go?”
I looked down at the body in my arms. His skin had paled so much, and he felt like ice against me. All of the determination and life had drained from him. Everything about that body that made it so wonderfully Konstantin was gone.
I set him gently on the floor, and I held out my hand to Ridley, letting him pull me to my feet. I’d been kneeling for so long, my legs had gone numb and weak, and I had to lean on Ridley to keep from falling.
“Bryn.” His arm was around my waist, and he put his other hand on my face, gently encouraging me to look at him. “Are you okay?”
“The kingdom is in chaos. Many of my friends and neighbors are dead. Ember is dead. Konstantin is dead. I killed the Queen.” I shrugged my shoulders limply. “I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again.”
“It will be okay,” he promised me, with his fingers in my hair. “You’re stronger than this, and you will be okay again.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, looking up at him. In the darkness of his eyes, I saw the same despair that I felt, but also his perseverance pushing him on.
“Because I know you, and I know how much fight you have in you. You won’t let anything keep you down for long.” He ran his thumb along my cheek. “That’s why I love you so much.”
He leaned in, kissing me softly and sweetly on the mouth. We’d kissed more deeply before, more passionately, but this was a much different kind of kiss. This was relief and sadness and simply because we needed to. Because we were still alive, and we needed to remind ourselves that there was still so much left to live for.
“I need to go,” he said softly. “I need to go tell King Mikko that the Queen is dead, so we can stop the fighting. With her and Viktor out of the way, there’s no reason a truce can’t be reached.”
“Go,” I told him as I stepped back from him. “Go and stop this before more people get hurt.”
He nodded. “I’ll be back for you.”
I smiled weakly at him. “I know.”
Ridley hurried out of the room, to put a stop to all the death and carnage. I picked up Vita before she hopped into any blood, and I carried her over to the window. I pushed back the sheer curtains to see what had become of my town, while absently petting the soft white fur of the rabbit.
So much of the snow had gone red with blood. Broken bodies littered the ground. Homes and buildings were smashed up in places, some destroyed entirely. Doldastam was in shambles, exactly as Mina had wanted.
But I couldn’t let her win. The Kanin people wouldn’t. They were stronger than this. I’d learned to be a fighter growing up here, watching people rise above their places in this world, and together, somehow, we would find the strength to put this back together.
We could not let anyone destroy us.
EIGHTY
hope
June 7, 2014
In the days that followed, the ice began to thaw. The snow that had covered the town melted away, and while it wasn’t exactly a heat wave, green began sprouting up in the patches of lawn between the cottages. In a few places, pink and purple wildflowers were beginning to blossom.