Page 390 of Kingdom of Ash

Her lifeless body had been spiked to the gates of Orynth, her hair shorn to her scalp.

Rowan knelt before the gates, the armies of Morath streaming past him. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. Yet the sun warmed his face. The reek of death filled his nose.

He gritted his teeth, willing himself out, away from this place. This waking nightmare.

It didn’t falter.

A hand brushed his shoulder, gentle and small.

“You brought this upon yourself, you know,” said a lilting female voice.

He knew that voice. Would never forget it.

Lyria.

She stood behind him, peering up at Aelin. Clad in Maeve’s dark armor, her brown hair braided back from her delicate, lovely face.“You brought it upon her, too, I suppose,” his mate—his lie of a mate—mused.

Dead. Lyria was dead, and Aelin was the one meant to survive—

“You would pick her over me?” Lyria demanded, her chestnut eyes filling. “Is that the sort of male you have become?”

He couldn’t find any words, anything to explain, to apologize.

Aelin was dead.

He couldn’t breathe. Didn’t want to.

Connall was smirking at him. “Everything that happened to me is because of you.”

Kneeling on that veranda in Doranelle, in a palace he’d hoped to never see again, Fenrys fought the bile that rose in his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, but would you change it? Was I the sacrifice you were willing to make in order to get what you wanted?”

Fenrys shook his head, but it was suddenly that of a wolf—the body he had once loved with such pride and fierceness. A wolf’s form—with no ability to speak.

“You took everything I ever wanted,” his twin went on. “Everything. Did you even mourn me? Did it even matter?”

He needed to tell him—tell his twin everything he’d meant to say, wished he’d been able to convey. But that wolf’s tongue did not voice the language of men and Fae. No voice. He had no voice.

“I am dead because of you,” Connall breathed. “I suffered because of you. And I will never forget it.”

Please.The word burned on his tongue.Please—

She couldn’t endure it.

Rowan kneeling there, screaming.

Fenrys sobbing toward the darkened skies.

And Lorcan—Lorcan in utter silence, eyes unseeing as some untold horror played out.

Maeve hummed to herself. “Do you see what I can do? What they are powerless against?”

Rowan screamed louder, the tendons in his neck bulging. Fighting Maeve with all he had.

She couldn’t endure it. Couldn’t stand it.

This was no illusion, no spun dream. This, their pain—this was real.

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