Page 217 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

You are her ruin.

Now the Arcane is looking at me. “You will choose your friends’ lives over your own?” It smiles, the teeth ugly and yellow and decayed. “When you are what we’ve been waiting for.”

Still on the floor, I throw my knife at its throat and it pulls it out as if I’ve done no significant damage at all. The blood wipes clean off the blade and moves through the air and back into the wound. Then it closes with a sizzle.

Kind of like mine.

“Very well,” it says.

Two more of these ugly creatures come in, and Yuki wields his sword and says, “Oh this is insulting, man! Three to eight?”

Three against eight could be an easy fight, if my knife trick worked.

The first creature turns to him and Yuki falls to the floor, clutching to his chest.

And when the same thing happens to Aralia, I run in front of her before I can think of it. Immediately, my vision dims as the screams of pain pass my lips. I hear Lucian call my name and an unfamiliar voice say, “Oh, ease up on her.”

Another says, “She killed Ciella.”

Then all the sound ceases to exist and I’m writhing on the ground in sheer agony. This pain, it’s in my chest and it’s going to kill?—

“Desdemona!” Lucian shouts. I see him running to me, swinging his sword wherever he can. He severs a hand. Then he falls to the floor.

It’s a shame it’s taken me so long to get here, to decide I’m finally ready to tear back every mask and burn every fear. Because it seems I’m out of time.

Because now, there’s nothing.

A flicker of light.

A fire so hot I swear it’s melting me.

A layer of soot, a gasp of air, and Lucian across the floor from me, looking at me in sheer shock while he clutches onto his own chest.

“No,” I manage to say, trying to sit up, but there are pounds of ash holding me down. They’re doing to him what they did to me.

And I’d expected my heart to stop beating.

“No!”

Yuki and Kai lie unconscious, but I see they’re still breathing. An Arcane holds a knife to Aralia’s chest, and she barely moves. Calista and Lilac are frozen everywhere but their eyes. Wendy lies on the floor with a blade in her thigh, but there’s no blood.

“We didn’t kill them,” the one who called Lucian “son” says. “For you. We have no qualms with murder, if it will encourage you.”

“Lucian.” I pry my way out from below the ash and crawl my way to him. He’s sweating like he’s being burnt and clutching his heart like it’s going to explode. “Stop it!” I think they just had me almost dead on the floor, and still, they’re trying to encourage me to go with them.

It only stands to reason that they can’t make me go against my will—otherwise, they would’ve taken me in the school hallways or my old dwelling. They had a number of opportunities to simply kidnap me, but they wanted to encourage me.

Taking a deep breath, I say, “I’ll go with you. But only if you let me say goodbye.”

“No—” Lucian chokes.

“Let him go, Aisling.”

Lucian’s grip on his shirt, over his heart, loosens. He grabs my hand like it’s his life force and says, “Don’t go.” His weak, trembling hand reaches for my cheek and he whispers like a vow of love, “I can’t forget you.”

Right. Because if I feared losing my life ever before, that was a child’s game. What I’m about to do is worse than death.

I glance around the room, at how easily these three creatures have taken down the eight of us. I don’t even have an inkling of hope that we’d stand a chance if we had a do-over.

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