Page 97 of These Divided Shores
Lu gasped, the smoke filling her lungs with grit.
“But you both are to blame.” Milo didn’t stop. Wouldn’t, not until everyone was broken at his feet—until Kari the Wave was just as destroyed as Lu. “Your husband didn’t tell me that it was his child, merely that she was observant and would give up the secrets she had learned from the revolutionaries. But Pious God above, she did not break. I know now—it was because of you, wasn’t it, Kari?”
Lu swayed. The Hemlight dropped from her fingers.
At her back, Kari’s shoulders heaved. “Adeluna,” came her rasping voice. She sounded in pain. “Go. You wanted... you wanted to be here. Go get Elazar.”
Milo’s voice was directly ahead of Kari now. “You made her too strong for her own good. So you see, both you and your husband are to blame for what I had to do to your daughter that night. She still has scars from me—I know. I’ve seen them.”
Kari screamed as though her soul had been cleaved out of her chest.
Her mother was unbreakable, a commander, an impassable wall. And that night in the safe house, Lu had imagined Kari in this situation, tortured by an enemy, and had known Kari would never yield. The very idea of her mother breaking was unfathomable.
But in that scream, Lu could hear Kari’s heart fracturing.
Milo had hurt her, too. Milo had made her mother wail like that.
Kari took a step forward and Lu spun with her, knowing that even if she didn’t have Incris in her body, she still would have moved faster than candlelight. She knocked her mother to the ground, and Kari fell with a cry in the disorienting fog, but Lu was gone, footfall after footfall, breaths hoarse in her ears.
Tears tumbled down Lu’s cheeks, a sob stinging her throat as much as the Rhodofume fog. She ran. She ran hard and straight, a knife out in one hand.
It happened in a blink. To Lu, the seconds stretched out, her speed slowing the fogged world around her to the single point where she had last heard Milo’s voice.
He appeared through the Rhodofume. And she was upon him.
Her knife was in his stomach.
Milo jolted with surprise. The scarf around his face slipped, showing his grimace as he looked down at the hilt of her dagger in his gut.
“Bitch,” Milo rasped. He grabbed her arm. “You bitch.”
They had been here before. Lu had survived.
Milo would not.
She had wanted blood from this fight. Blood she got.
Lu twisted the knife in. Up. His blood poured over her hand, his fingers losing traction on her wrist. Every gush fed the darkness in Lu’s soul, the part of her that wanted to cry out in joy at this man’s life oozing between her fingers.
Milo choked. Blood spurted down his chin.
Around them, the Rhodofume fog was dissipating. Lu felt other presences nearby—Kari, a hand on her back; Nayeli, calling out to her—but this moment created its own fog.
Tom had spoken of fate to her once before, fate that she had killed for him.
This was fate. That she had used permanent magic to kill Milo.
His grip on her wrist tightened again. She sucked in a breath, her first sense of fear—her first sense of anything, truly, she was hollow and empty and a soldier—
“Kill me. Doesn’t... matter,” he sneered. “Still—have—Port Mesi-Teab.”
Lu lost all feeling in her body. She yanked back, freeing her dagger, and Milo sank to the ground at her feet.
Beyond him, the defensors were in retreat. Had the Emerdian, Grozdan, and Tuncian raiders truly overpowered them? Battered raiders chased the defensors down the twisting streets and alleys; the defensors who had been onthe rooftops, hurling Rhodofume pods, were the only ones left to look down and see.
“They killed the general!” they cried. “The raiders murdered our general!”
The defensors’ accusations stoked the remaining Port Fausta citizens. Weeping grew, savage screams for safety, and Lu reveled in it.
