Page 118 of The Rebel and the Rose
That name – thesightof her – was like an arrow through his heart. ‘Anouk?’
Ransom was on his knees before he realized he was falling, the whole world spinning until it was just the two them crawling towards each other, across the endless aching chasm that had been yawning between them for ten long years. And now he was here. And so was she. Remade by fate itself, and thrust into his path. He felt those unseen gossamer strands tightening around him, Oriel’s hand falling heavily on his shoulder. He welcomed it, welcomed all of it, this grand game of destiny where the people he loved the most were, by some divine sense of irony, the key players.
Impossible.
Impossible.
‘Anouk,’ he said, trembling as he reached for her. Desperate to know that she was real, even as he felt the truth of this moment thrumming deep in the waters of his soul.
The same question rolled from her tongue, both of them whispering to each other in the moonlit dark. ‘How?’
Chapter 30Seraphine
‘How is this possible?’ said Theo, the minute they stepped into the Rose Garden and saw who awaited them there. Sitting in an armchair beside the dance floor, as though he had been holding court all morning in the deserted mill, Prince Andreas lazily waved them over. Maskless now, Lark was perched on his right, as stiff as the skeleton glimmering under his taut, greying skin, while Talisa Mondragon – the prince’s cousin, occupied the chair on his left.
An hour had passed since Sera had bolted from the graveyard at the sight of the Necromancer, overwhelmed by the startling realization about what it meant about her own magic. Abouther. Enough time to find her friends back at the Paramour and tell them everything she’d witnessed in ahalf-garbled hysterical rant that made Val rush to fetch her a shot of whiskey, while Theo took her pulse, sure she was about to keel over.
After a fruitless return trip to the graveyard, they had come to the red mills to see the truth for themselves.
However out of place Lark Delano had looked in the cemetery, he looked even stranger in the empty Rose Garden, an apparition conjured from the worst of Sera’s nightmares, occupying a high-backed velvet armchair like the king of death.
‘Told you I wasn’t crazy,’ she said now.
Val bit off a curse as they drifted closer. ‘I really thought you had hallucinated him. But that is definitely Lark Delano, undead Dagger.’
Theo shuddered between tentative steps.
‘I prefer the term “saint”,’ Lark called across the empty dance floor. ‘I do have feelings you know.’
‘Well, at least being dead all that time hasn’t affected your hearing,’ Theo called back.
‘Not for Seraphine’s lack of trying,’ parried Lark. ‘I feel for you, Saint-maker. I can’t imagine there’s anything more infuriating than going to the trouble of killing someone only to have their corpse rise from its fancy coffin newly imbued with unfathomable magic.’ He flashed his teeth. Despite the rest of him, his smile was pearly white, that shit-eating grin all but blinding under the low lighting. ‘All things considered, I’m grateful for the accidental sainthood. Even despite the unfortunate downturn in handsomeness.’
Val wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Andreas rolled his hand, gesturing impatiently. ‘Enough squabbling. Come in and be civil. We’re all on the same side. And we have work to do.’
Sera marched across the dance floor. In the last hour, she had had some time to digest this shocking turn of fate, and she had a bone – or in fact several – to pick with Lark Delano. ‘You tried to kill me in that graveyard yesterday. You tried to kill Nadia. One of your own.’
Lark raised a warning finger. ‘Ah-ah. I think you’ll find you are mistaken.’
Sera’s fingers twitched into fists. If she had any idea how she’d accidentally made this prick in the first place, she’d be unmaking him right now.
‘I was trying to speak to Nadia.Alone,’ Lark clarified. ‘The bones were a misguided attempt at distraction. I was hoping to chaseyouoff. I didn’t think she’d spook so easily.’
Sera curled her lip. ‘Next time, try using your words.’
‘Andreas told me not to speak to you until we were together,’ said Lark, sounding petulant. ‘He said you’d need time to adjust to my identity.’
‘Insofar as it revealed your own,’ Andreas supplied.
Accidental saint-maker.
How could she forget?
‘And I suppose he was right about that, considering you bolted from us only this morning like a frightened rat,’ Lark went on. He pulled a long, gruesome face. ‘Am I really so hideous?’
‘Yes,’ said Sera through her teeth. She would not soon forget the skeleton he had sent after her, or the bones that still littered that graveyard.
