Page 138 of A Reign of Roses
“After I had more fun trapped inside a wine cellar than I’d had in two hundred years of living.”
I looped my arms around Kane’s neck and kissed him again. Chaste, joyful—my feet arched in my shoes and sparks danced up my spine when his fingers curled there.
“I think,” Kane murmured against my lips, “our friends may have had enough of our kissing.”
But I didn’t let go. I wasn’t sure I could, all my focus on those simmering, silver eyes heated with unfiltered, unending love.
“Lucky for us,” Kane continued with a mild shrug, “I don’t give a—”
My heart surged into my throat before I knew why. Just a fraction of a second—the one in which my body knew before my mind, before my consciousness, that something was terribly, grievously wrong.
Then, with a shattering roar—the ceiling raineddown.
PART IV
The Rise
38
Arwen
Fragments of brick and stonefell like missiles. Ice-cold wind cut through the room with the decimation of the temple’s towering spire. Voices screeching, bodies surging, ground shaking, the blood—where was thebloodcoming from?—splattered against the old wood of the pews…
Leigh, I had to findLeigh—
And there had been no horns, no warning…
Dozens of men in the keep must’ve been precisely, carefully executed long before the wedding for this to have happened. How had I not realized…
Mercenaries.
My feet stumbled down the stone steps, hands frantically searching through fallen wood beams and toppled statues of the Stones. Through so many moaning in agony, the urge to heal them writhing at my fingertips.
Leigh, Leigh, Leigh—
A second blow smashed through the ceiling.
Scales of gray filled my vision as I craned my neck up while I ran.
It was a tail, slicing through the temple walls. The spiked, sickly gray of a vicious, roaring wyvern.
Lazarus—Lazarus had come for Shadowhold.
Kane was nowhere to be found amid the turmoil, and for a moment the most gut-wrenching thought imaginable sliced through me.
He’s already dead.
But the earsplitting, resonant roar from the now-gaping hole in the temple ceiling offered a twisted rush of relief. Smooth, sleek black wings clashed with veined ashy ones in a violent blur above me.
Kane’s shifting had saved us time—a few minutes at most, as he dragged his father away through the skies—but we needed to get as many people to safety as possible before…
Mercenaries converged on the temple like a cyclone. I’d forgotten their speed. How mighty, how muchpowerLazarus’s most valuable Fae assassins contained. And all their perverse, shifted forms. Multiheaded, snarling hydras; flying lizards with the razor-sharp beaks of eagles; brutal-looking women with bodies like mythical birds—harpies, those. Squawking and shrieking as they tore their claws into our soldiers like wet parchment.
My lighte shot from my fingertips and into the heart of a wolfbeast not unlike the one that had attacked me so long ago. The rabid creature flew back into an altar of unlit candles before he could rip his fangs through an Onyx guard shielding the sweet harpist, now covered in blood.
“Go,” I urged them, gritting my teeth as flares of sunfire split from my wrists and twined around the creature. “Get everyone to safety. To the lower floors, now.”
Griffin soared overhead, his wingspan knocking over the long-since-abandoned harp as he used his claws to scoop a featheredmercenary up by her haunches and toss her out one of the shattered stained-glass windows. Flecks of rosy glass littered the floor at his feet.
