Page 53 of Iridian

Tears in my eyes when I raised my head to look at that protruding piece of rock where we’d fought. Goddess, it looked even higher from down here. And I was laughing and crying at the same time to see Taland standing at the edge of it with his hands on his hips as he watched me.

Alive.I couldn’t see his face from so far up, but I knew he was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking:we made it, baby. We fucking made it.

As if he read the thoughts in my mind, he raised two fists to the sky.

Laughter burst out of me, and I imagined he was laughing, too. Fuck, I couldn’t wait to kiss his face, to wrap my arms around him already. I couldn’t fucking wait for someone to heal me—and him, too, because he’d fought just as much as I had—so we could get the hell away from this place together.

Except…

“Rosabel.”

The voice held my heart prisoner for a good beat, and I looked down to find none other than Helen Paine with her sword in her hand, with George on one side and Natasha on the other.She looked like shit, too, her white clothes covered in blood and dirt, but the others didn’t have a speck on them.

Regardless—it was the look in Helen’s icy-grey eyes that made me pause.

“Where is the bracelet?”

The bracelet, the bracelet, the bracelet—I raised my head and looked at Taland again.

Taland who wasn’t holding his fists to the sky anymore but was simply looking down from the edge now.

My jaws opened, but I found I was going to need a moment to be able to speak.

I never really got the chance to answer before I heard the screams.

Aurelia’s screams as she and her brother were beingdraggedaway from the rocks where they’d fought the Devil, and they had definitely won because he wasn’t laughing. But now those soldiers wearing their navy uniforms were dragging them both away, right through the edges of the valley and back where we first came from, wheremoresoldiers were coming, jumping into the valley with their guns and their wands and…

Radock and Kaid and Seth, bloody and on their knees.

I did a double take because there was no way I was seeing right. There was no way that the Tivoux brothers would be forced to their knees and held there by a dozen soldiers, with cuffs around their wrists, all bloody and dirty, when Kaid and Seth hadn’t even been in the fucking fight. Just like George and Natasha, they hadn’t been in the fight—so why were they bloody?!

Why were they being held to their knees?

“Very well,” Helen said. She stepped back, waved her sword around as if to show the aftermath of the fucking massacre—the blood and the bodies and the body pieces, too. Most of them wearing those white uniforms. Most of them soldiers of Hill.

“Kill them all,” Helen said—loud and clear so that her voice echoed and every soldier in that valley and around it heard.

And I thought,wait, wait, hold on a minute…

But she didn’t. She just raised her sword toward that landing where Hill died. Where Taland was watching, waiting…

“And bring me that bracelet!”

She turned around to walk away.

My thoughts clashed onto one another, and Radock had his head up and he was laughing, and the soldiers who’d been holding me up until now put me down on my knees, too.

There was still a part of me that insisted this wasn’t happening, or that it was simply a prank, or that Helen was messing with us or something. There was still a part of me that refused to accept that she had said those words at all.

But she had. Of course, she had said those words, had ordered her soldiers to kill us all when we were wounded from the battle, when we’d barely gotten out with our lives. Of course, she would order the soldiers to kill us becauseshe hadsoldiers. Soldiers that my grandmother sent here for her, lots and lots of them—countless.

What could we do against all of them now?

I raised my head and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “TALAND!”

Tears streamed from my eyes because I was weak and I couldn’t even stand on my own and my magic barely even slithered inside me because I’d exhausted it. Radock laughed, and Kaid tried to stand up, and Aurelia screamed and screamed while they dragged her and her brother away—and I just wanted Taland to make it.

Goddess, was that too much to ask?Can he justmakeit?Because then all of this wouldn’t have been for nothing. Because if he climbed that mountain and disappeared somewhere far away, then neither of us would have died in vain.

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