They nod to him, a gesture that even I find reassuring. After the battle they’ve endured, after all they’ve lost, and seeing Dimitri fight alongside them, I think they’re prepared to vouch for him.
Dimitri looks down to me, guilt thrashing through him and I do what I can to ease it. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“I know,” I say, wincing through the pain. “Believe it or not, it’s not what I wanted either.”
He hangs his head lower. “I don’t want to leave you, but to stay would make me—"
“It’s all right, Dimitri. I know. You have to go. I’ll be…gone soon anyway. You weren’t meant to live among fugitives. You’re a Crusader now.”
A muscle feathers in his jaw.
“I’ll be all right.” The lie brings out a horrified snort from him, so I correct myself. “I’ll be with my sister. You don’t have to worry about me being alone. I’ll be with family.”
He leans over so our foreheads are pressed together again. I want so badly to kiss him, to feel the irritatingly always clean-shaven face against my own one last time, so that I might die with the thought of something soft and warm instead of the churning darkness festering in my gut.
But Dimitri pulls away without ever glancing at my lips. Gently, he places me back down in the dirt, the ground colder now in the absence of his warm embrace.
Dimitri strides away, toward the other Crusaders. As he passes Alphonse’s lifeless body, he glares down at him with so much disdain I wonder if it had been buried within him all this time; he’d just been too loyal to allow it to show. Joining the others, he mounts one of the horses that no longer has a rider, and even as they gallop away, never once does he look back.
I realize with sinking grief that his face will not be the last among my memories. I will never feel his embrace again, never catch his scent on me after a night stolen together.
I’m certain that I’ve shattered into a hundred, fractured pieces, and that it would take a lifetime just to put me back together again, but then someone lifts all of me into the air. I startle, my hands grasping for anything to hold onto, and finding Ryven’s neck.
Someone coughs out of my sight, but the sound is watery, as if they’re spitting up blood.
“Piss on a mage,” Adrien says, glancing somewhere behind us. “He’s alive.” He blows through his lips, exchanging a glance with the others before returning his attention to Ryven. “You have her?”
Ryven’s dark gaze burrows into mine, and though he nods, his words are meant for me. “As long as she is with me, she will be safe.”
My cheeks flush like a candle held too close to the skin.
“Good,” says my uncle. “Take her back to camp. Be swift. We’ll be right behind you.”
“He’s not taking her anywhere,” Kalli demands, the fiery conviction of a boiling pot of water bubbling in her words. She challenges anyone to argue with her otherwise.
Ryven’s mouth twitches, and before I know it, he spreads his membranous wings and bounds into the sky. May bravery fill his heart and protect his life for whenever Kalli gets her hands on him.
My heart thrills in my chest and I squeeze Ryven’s neck tighter. My hand grazes something rough and edged, and I realize with alarming fright that I’m grasping the demonized side of his body. The black spikes along his shoulder fade up his neck, feather-small. I recoil and tuck my arms against myself, only later realizing that I’ve just reacted the same way Dimitri did when he thought I was a mage.
“I’m sorry,” I manage, but my voice is so raspy, it’s hardly audible over the rush of the wind around us.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to hold onto me. I have you.”
With another rush of heat to my face, I realize he does have me. I am as secured in his hulking arms as I would be behind a stone wall.
With his wings beating overhead, my eyes slowly flutter shut and I see Dimitri’s face. Not the pained expression he wore when I saw him moments before, nor that of the young man I grew up with, but one of my fondest memories of him, the day he emerged from the stairway in the castle the first day we were to train as Crusaders. Bathed and groomed, he looked like a new man. He wasn’t the butcher’s ward anymore, he wasn’t a pitiable orphan boy, but a man, one with convictions and aspirations. I came to know Dimitri more in these last few months than I came to knew him in our entire lives, and should we have survived this together, I would’ve been honored to remain at his side.
We were meant to right the world together, to protect and save Arcathain.
Hopefully, he can follow through on that dream once I’m gone.
And with that thought, with Dimitri’s handsome face still in my mind’s eye, I lean my head against Ryven’s chest, and let the venom coursing through my veins consume me.
To be continued
Blighted Heart
Book 2 of Primordials of Shadowthorn
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