Page 74 of Kingdom of Ash

She blinked. Paused.

Maeve’s smile returned, soft and kind. As her aunt had been to her from the start. “Where do you think the keys are, Aelin?”

She opened her mouth once more. And again halted.

Like an invisible chain yanked her back. Silenced her.

Chain—a chain. She glanced down at her hands, her wrists. As if expecting them to be there.

She had never felt a shackle’s bite in her life. And yet she stared at the empty place on her wrist where she could have sworn there was a scar. Only smooth, sun-kissed skin remained.

“If this world were at risk, if those three terrible kings threatened to destroy it, where would you go to find the keys?”

Aelin looked up at her aunt.

Another world. There was another world. Like a fragment of a dream, there was another world, and in it, she had a wrist with a scar on it. Had scars all over.

And her mate, perched overhead … He had a tattoo down his face and neck and arm in that world. A sad story—his tattoo told a sad, awful story. About loss. Loss caused by a dark queen—

“Where are the keys hidden, Aelin?”

That placid, loving smile remained on Maeve’s face. And yet …

And yet.

“No,” Aelin breathed.

Something slithered in the depths of her aunt’s stare. “No what?”

This wasn’t her existence, her life. This place, these blissful months learning in Doranelle, finding her mate—

Blood and sand and crashing waves.

“No.”

Her voice was a thunderclap through the peaceful glen.

Aelin bared her teeth, fingers curling in the moss.

Maeve let out a soft laugh. Rowan flapped from the branches to land on the queen’s upraised arm.

He didn’t so much as fight it when she wrapped her thin white hands around his neck. And snapped it.

Aelin screamed. Screamed, clutching at her chest, at the shredding mating bond—

Aelin arched off the altar, and every broken and torn part of her body screamed with her.

Above her, Maeve was smiling. “You liked that vision, didn’t you?”

Not real. That had not been real. Rowan was alive, he wasalive—

She tried to move her arm. Red-hot lightning lashed her, and she screamed again.

Only a broken rasp came out. Broken, just as her arm now lay—

Now lay—

Bone gleamed, jutting upward along more places than she could count. Blood and twisted skin, and—

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