Page 332 of A Flame of the Phoenix

Zaiana reached for one of the arrows to pull it free, but he caught her wrist. Their stares locked, hateful and passionate.

“Leave me,” he said.

“I hate you, Maverick. But I don’t desire a world where I don’t get to hate you. Not unless you leave it on my terms.”

His black eyes flared. Their stare-off intensified until his grip loosened on her, and she reached again for the arrow.

Her next breath choked in her throat when he pushed her roughly. Caught completely off-guard, she lost her balance, falling hard onto her side.

Zaiana pushed herself up…and was met with the most world-shifting sight.

How hadn’t she felt Mordecai approach? How had he gotten close enough to strike her in the back completely unaware? How had she been so slow to feel the Spellthief aimed for her heart…that was now plunged through Maverick’s instead.

Zaianascreamed.

There was power in the sound the expelled from her. Waves and waves of unleashed lightning that blasted into the high lord, and she lost him in the violent waves of jagged purple lines.

Though she’d wanted to look him in the eye as she took his life, Zaiana hoped he’d burned to ash in the power of her lightning he tried to steal.

Maverick’s groan snapped her attention to him. She gasped, lunging across the short space as he fell forward on his knees. Zaiana caught him.

Her heart slammed rapidly against his as it struggled to beat. Zaiana didn’t know what to do, and it was strange what loose ends and silly questions demanded answers now time had turned to sand and was slipping through her fingers.

“What did you want to say?” she breathed.

When Maverick didn’t answer, she pushed him off her chest to look at his face. She shook him when his lids fluttered, desperate to keep him conscious in her complete denial that there was no saving him.

“In the cave that night, do you remember? You wanted to say something, and I stopped you. What did you want to say?”

His trembling hand rose, barely grazing her chin before it fell limp to rest on her neck. “It wasn’t just one night for me,” his voice rasped. He was fading fast.

A sharp sob escaped her lips with a shake of her head as she gripped him tighter. “It wasn’t just one night for me either.”

Maverick tried to smile, but it was pained and short lived. She grappled his dark stare, the fear in them cleaving so deep within her.

“You once said we were the monsters that don’t get a happy ending.” His words were barely a whisper of gravel. Zaiana tuned out everything but him. The howling wind, the distant cries of fighting, the clashing of weapons. Like she’d done so many times before, Zaiana masterfully tuned it all out to catch every one of his last words. “I used to think there was no happy, only endings. But you showed me differently. You showed me…how to love again in this second hollow life.

Zaiana’s emotions choked her.

“I knowyoufeel love. I’ve seen it. My happy ending is getting to tell you that. Might we have met in a different time or realm, we would have met on the same side of the battlefield…but I’m glad in this life we didn’t. I’m glad…you chose the right side.”

It was only death—death—that could explode the vault of denial she’d sealed in her mind.Deaththat could grip every suppressed memory and feeling and drown her mercilessly.

“You can’t die like this,” she said through gritted teeth while his body fell into her again.

“I died a long time ago, Zaiana. More than once. The day they changed me. Then the second I stood before my own mate and didn’t recognize her until it was too late and she’d died by my hand, I almost ended it all…until you.

“After the Blood Trials, you killed Finnian. And I knew that spiral that started within you. Love wasn’t what either of us needed—it was hate. Something to deflect our self-loathing onto.I think you’ve known it too. Every time we battled, verbal blows or with steel, it was like attacking the person in the mirror. Unleashing all we felt about ourselves because we were one and the same. At some point, I suppose exhaustion took over, and I started to fall for you when I didn’t want to. I knew you could never be mine. We would have both been stuck here, tragically cursed to never move on from our pasts.”

Tears spilled over her eyes as she stared up at the night sky over his shoulder, holding him, listening to the broken countdown in his chest through all his confessions. Her throat was too tight; her chest swelled with agony. She thought she might die here with him.

He said, his voice slipping away with every word, “Please…let me die as Maverick Blackfair, but can you tell them to remember me as Callen Osirion? And tell Faythe Ashfyre…tell her it was all for you.”

“Stop,” she croaked, holding him tighter when he fell limp, the weight of him crushing her, but she didn’t care. “Stopdying!”

It was too late.

That plea left her lips to be heard only by the wind Maverick’s last breath carried on.

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