I shove down the memory of Derrick’s voice. “You never told me you loved me.”
Gavin shrugs. “I planned to tell you the night before I left for Oxford. I was going to say it when you sneaked me into your bedroom and kissed me.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I hoped you would ask me to stay in Edinburgh. You didn’t.”
Gavin never would have gone to Oxford and caught that illness. He never would have died and come back with the Sight and I wouldn’t have gone to that ball at the Assembly Rooms as a debutante. Maybe my mother wouldn’t have been murdered that night. Maybe that one decision would have changed everything.
“So you left?” My smile is small, sad. “You didn’t stop to think about how I was a sixteen-year-old girl, still giddy from her first kiss, and too terrified to say I love you?”
I’m still too terrified to say those words. Some things don’t change.
“I was your first kiss?”
“Of course you were my first. I waited years for that kiss.”
“I would have waited years to marry you,” Gavin tells me. “I wanted to, long before we were forced into an engagement. If you wanted me, too. Not that it matters now.”
I stare at the scars on his cheek, at the one along his collarbone. “I suppose nothing worked out the way we hoped, did it?”
“Never in a thousand years.” His smile is quick, forced. “But I like to think if things had been different, we would have been happy. Don’t you?”
When I imagine all that could have been, my mind comes up empty. My life has become so entwined with this war that anything else seems more dream than reality. I barely remember the girl I was.
I look down at my hands. Catherine washed the blood off, but I can still see it dried beneath my fingernails. Now that I think about it, my nails are hardly ever clean. They’re always a reminder of all the fae I’ve killed.
I’m a creature of chaos and death and maybe this is how I’m meant to die. In a battle. At the end of a long war.
If things had been different and Kiaran had never come into my life, maybe I would have married Gavin. Maybe we could have been happy living in Edinburgh with our children.
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “But I like to think so.”
He stares down at his hands, too, as if he were thinking the same things I was. “If we manage to survive this, what will you and Kiaran do?”
Kiaran will be with Sorcha. She’ll spend the next thousand years chipping away at pieces of his soul until there’s nothing left of the Kiaran I know. An eternity of servitude given to her so I can have a book—a book that my friend lost his life for.
“I haven’t thought about it,” I lie.
“Aileana.” He sucks in a breath to say something else, but I interrupt him.
“I’m dying.” The words leave my mouth in a rush of breath. “I’m dying,” I say again, lower this time. “Every time I use my powers, it kills me a little more. So I can’t think about anything else. I have to find the Book, or—”
Something makes me look up to the dark line of trees. It’s Kiaran.
His eyes meet mine, and I know he heard everything.
CHAPTER 42
I PUSH TO my feet. “MacKay. Wait—”
He doesn’t look back at me as he turns and walks off into the woods.
I hurry after him. “Damn it, MacKay, stop.” When the stubborn arse keeps walking, I say, “You can’t go much farther unless you want to fall off a bloody cliff, so stop being a coward and talk to me.”
That does the trick. Kiaran pauses, his back to me. “What do you want, Kam?”
I say the first thing that comes to mind: “I was going to tell you.”
“When?” Kiaran turns. His face is so shadowed that I can’t make out his expression. “When?” At my silence, he says bitterly, “Let me guess: as your last words?”
His lilac irises are blazing in the darkness. For a moment I can’t help but recall the Morrigan’s blue eyes. I’m assaulted by memories of Kiaran snatching Derrick out of the air to crush him. Like he was a dragonfly. A bug. A pest.
Shall I sacrifice my pawn?
As if sensing my thoughts, Kiaran looks away, his gaze ashamed as he stares out at the trees. When he speaks, his voice is so soft I barely hear the words. “I watched you die twice, Kam. I just got you back.”
“I’m mortal,” I say gently. “You have to accept that I won’t live forever and I doubt the Book can change that.” When he doesn’t respond, I sigh. “What would you have said if I told you? Would you have tried to stop me from using my powers?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know.”
I can’t bear our distance. I close the space between us and slip my arms around him. He lets me press my cheek against his chest and listen to his heart beat. When his arms circle me and he holds me close, I shut my eyes.
I want to forget everything. I want to stand here, with you, and forget the whole world. I want . . .
I tell him the truth: “I wish I had a thousand years with you. More.”
“Not a thousand more years, Kam. That’s time I already have. It’s time I’ve already lived.”
“What, then?”
Kiaran strokes a finger down my cheek, along my jawline, across my eyebrows. Like he’s memorizing us just like this, little fragments for when I’m gone. For all the years he has ahead without me. “I want one lifetime with you. Not hundreds, not thousands, not eternity. I just want one.”
When I lean in and press my lips to his, I notice the blackness of his outer irises has begun to creep back in. Not as dark as it was in the mirrored room, but dark enough that it looks like a shadow crossing a spring field.
His kiss is careful. So very careful. I know he’s remembering the things he did. I know he’s remembering his teeth at my neck, biting down.
How much time do we have? How much time do I have?
Why love a butterfly when it starts to die the moment it gets its wings?
Later that night, the bonfire burns high for Derrick’s funeral.
Aithinne has scattered leaves, twigs, and branches—the only bits of nature we have left—across the ground in whirled designs that spread all the way around the camp.
There should be petals in every color, Aithinne told me as I helped her. Flowers scattered for miles, like we did for you. So everyone would know that he was loved. He deserves flowers. He deserves better than this.
She broke down in tears, and I held her shaking body until the thin edges of the shadowed moon rose in the sky.
As I make my way across the camp toward where Aithinne and the others stand around the flames, my chest aches again.
Don’t cry. You know I don’t like to see you cry. You’re my favorite.
Sorcha isn’t with the others, and Kiaran is gone. I should have expected the guilt would be too much for him. He killed Derrick’s family. And Kiaran might have been under the Morrigan’s control, but his hands killed Derrick, too.
How can you not hate me for what I did? Kiaran asked me before I left him in the woods.