Page 199 of Mother of Death and Dawn

He looked up at me, and his face crumpled.

“It’s what he would have wanted,” he choked out, barely able to speak through his tears. “He would have been proud to die this way, Tisaanah. He—”

Suddenly, the bloodthirsty rage, the strange numbness, the intoxicating power was gone. All of it disappeared under the devastating wave of Serel’s grief.

I collapsed next to my friend and wrapped my arms around him, and he abandoned words in favor of heaving sobs.

“It’s what he would have wanted,” Serel kept saying, over and over again, as if it made anything better.

But Filias’s was not some grand cosmic trade. Yes, we had won our country back. But sometime today, a million deadly combinations of a million deadly acts converged in exactly the right way, and just like that, my best friend lost the love of his life.

That would never be a fair exchange.

The night wore on in wild celebration. But I stayed there with Serel and held him as he wept.

* * *

It wasdawn by the time Max ushered me away. Filias’s body was taken by Riasha for the funeral pyre. Serel now cried quietly and no longer spoke. Max and I brought him into one of the remaining houses. I laid him down and watched Sammerin heal his wounds. I kissed him on his forehead as one of Sammerin’s medicines sent him to a merciful, dreamless sleep.

Sammerin healed Max and I the best he could, then pointed to another uninhabited cabin and said we should get some rest.

Max led me there. I was silent as he ran a bath, helped me from my clothes, lowered me into the warm water like I was a child.

“Thank you.” My voice sounded strange. “Thank you for coming for me.”

“Always, Tisaanah.”

He kissed my forehead. My nose. My cheeks, left then right. “What did they do to you?”

“Nothing I couldn’t survive.”

His touch lingered on my crooked fingers, on the new marks on my back, on the welts at my neck, but he asked no more questions.

“When this is all over,” he said, softly, “maybe it won’t be about surviving anymore.”

For some reason, I found it difficult to speak past the lump in my throat. “Do you ever worry that you don’t know how to do anything else?”

He arranged himself behind me in the water, so his arms formed a warm embrace around me. “I know how to do some other things,” he murmured, and pulled my hair aside to kiss the back of my neck.

It was such a heartbreakingly tender gesture.

Before I knew what was happening, the tears were coming so hard I couldn’t breathe. My body shook with rough, painful sobs.

Max did not ask why I was crying. He did not tell me everything was going to be alright.

He just took a cloth and washed the blood from my back, stroke by stroke, gentle as a lullaby, and let me cry.

CHAPTEREIGHTY

MAX

It took many hours for Tisaanah to fall into a restless sleep. I lay there with her, not tired, curled around her naked body. As she slept, I took inventory of her injuries—the crooked fingers, the wounds, the new scars across the top of her shoulder blades. Six neat squares.

They had fuckingflayedher.

When I saw that, I regretted giving Lady Zorokov a quick death. Fuck morality. She should have burned.

I peered at Tisaanah’s face. She had cried so much that even in sleep, her eyes were red rimmed. I kissed her on the cheek and was careful not to wake her when I got out of bed. If she woke, I knew that she would immediately fling herself back outside to work, and it had been difficult enough just to get her to rest for a few hours.

---