Page 46 of A Single Thread Of Hope

I growledat the person who was trying to wake me. I wanted to stay in this blackness, untouched by pain and grief, where the whole ordeal could’ve just been a bad dream.

Except that fucker just kept trying to shake me awake.

“Néit, wake up.” Badb was on my bed. On Wren’s bed.

“Get off!” I shouted, and she showed that she still had a little good sense as she moved away quickly.

Beside me, Wren was still lying prone, coins over her eyes, though someone had removed her bloody sleep shirt and swathed her in soft white cotton. She looked like a corpse now, no life left in her body, almost like a wax figurine.

I hated it.

Jumping from the nest, I moved as far from the bed as I could get. As far away from that thing in the bed, whowasn’tthe great love of my immortal life.

I looked over at my ex-wife and growled. “She’s dead. She’s dead, and you didnothing.” It was like an arrow to the heart. “Idid nothing. And now she’s dead.”

Badb’s face softened. “I know. I heard Cliona’s cry, and the Valkyries filled me in on the rest. Néit, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even feel them enter the wards. Didn’t feel their bloodlust. They must have portaled directly into the nursery with the last of their power. They could never have restored themselves to being the Fates; this was petty revenge from deranged beings who didn’t know when to quit. There’s nothing you could have done.”

She stroked my arm softly, a touch that had been a regular thing so long ago, but now felt foreign. Would I forget the feel of Wren’s skin too?

“I didn’t want to wake you, but thought I should tell you that I had a dream.”

I frowned. She’d woken me to tell me she had a dream?What the actual fuck?I was a fucking mess, and she wanted to tell me about a dream?

“Get that look off your face, God of War. I wouldn’t disturb you if it wasn’t important, and you know it.” She sucked in a deep breath. “I had a dream about Fea.”

Another knife in the heart. Another love I couldn’t save.

“Did you just come to rub salt in my wound?” I spat.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Shut up. I had a dream about Fea, and she was walking in the Underworld with your Wren. I think she was trying to give me a sign. I think Fea’s trying to help Wren get back.”

Chapter 25

WREN

Iwas disoriented when I woke, but I knew with absolute certainty that I wasn’t at home, curled up beside one of the guys. It was cold and hot at the same time, like a bad fever. Plus, it smelled a little like an asscrack.

Cy appeared in my vision, but I could barely see him in the shadows.

Shadows.

The Moirai.

The knife.

I sat up with a gasp, my hand going to my chest, but there was no knife there now, not even a wound. I didn’t know why that made me feel more anxious, rather than less. I wasn’t in my sleep shirt either. Instead, I was in a long white dress that looked somewhere between a slip and a wedding dress.

What in the actual hell?

Cy shifted from dog to man, and for some strange reason, he was wearing pants. Normally when he changed, he came back naked. His stark white hair stood out in the darkness of our surroundings.

I tried to clutch on to those last few memories, but they were fleeting, just out of my grasp. But there was something about Mrs. B?

“Cy, what’s going on?” I whispered, my throat feeling raw.

He looked uncharacteristically solemn as he squatted down beside me, his thighs flexing in a way that was both hot as hell and wildly inappropriate in the moment. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Wren, but you’re, ah…” He scratched his chin and looked uncomfortable. “Not living?”

I blinked at him slowly. “My life to the fullest? Because I’d have to disagree.”

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