Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Chapter
Nineteen
If a kraken spots you, you’ve already lost.
–An Incomplete Guide to Kraken Survival
Two Days Until Convergence
Iwoke certain of one thing. There must be another way to save my firebrand.
My romance with Sebastian could not close with us apart. My beloved books didn’t end with happily never afters, and we wouldn’t either.
I leaped out of bed far too early and rushed through a shower, donned a lovely ice-blue dress, and plaited my hair. Barefoot, I opened the door between our rooms, breaking protocol and not caring, and soared into his section of the suite.
He stood at the window, already dressed and armored in terrible calm, watching the dark water press against the dome. I’d bet he hadn’t slept a minute.
Not even my entrance drew him around. The tension that rolled through his shoulders told me he’d clocked me before I ever crossed the threshold.
“Tell me everything again and again and again,” I demanded. “Every little detail about the rune, the convergence ceremony, your mother. Leave nothing out.”
Still, he didn’t turn. “Good shimmer to you, too, Brona.” He said it lightly, but that lightness didn’t reach the rest of him.
“Stalling won’t help.” I slid myself between Sebastian and the dome, forcing my way into his line of sight. “Last night you told me the rune moves into you. Unpack that first. I want the whole of it, right now.”
For a long moment, he said nothing. The colors in his eyes went flat and still, and I braced for a fight. Stillness never came before good news.
He searched my gaze, and for a heartbeat, grief flashed, old and bottomless and worn smooth, like the gold in his gallery. “You will not like it.”
“I already don’t like any of this. Tell me anyway.”
“You hope to find another way, and I would love more than anything to give you hope. But I won’t because that would be cruel.”
“Tell me anyway,” I repeated. I might find a nugget of gold he had missed.
“The convergence rune doesn’t want me to die.”
Okay. That sounded good so far.
“It wants my heart. I don’t mean the physical organ. We don’t have to cut that out and give it as an offering.”
That was good, too, but I struggled to put the pieces together. “If not the physical organ, what kind of heart?” There was only one I could think of, and it inspired nothing but dread. “The essence of you?”
“Já. The stone doesn’t take, Brona. It… becomes.”
Cold prickled my skin. “Becomes what? You?”
“Exactly. I will become it, and it will become me, and we will be one. A powerful weapon that will use my emotions as fuel. But it cannot do it without permission.”
That… nein. Absolutely not. “You’re telling me you will have a heart of stone and no emotions. Is that it?”
He nodded. “That is it.”
“And the rune needs your permission to do this.”
His gaze did not waver from mine. “As well as yours. Because what’s mine belongs to my consort. My firebrand. You have a claim upon me the rune recognizes.”
My breath snagged.
He squared his shoulders. “So. We will both allow it. The rune will embed itself in me. Spirit, soul, body. I’ll become a weapon, and I will carry it for the rest of my days.”
Ice slid down my spine. I pressed my palm to his chest. His heart beat beneath it. Warm. Strong. His. Mine. For now.
“I will live to execute whatever I deem a threat. Jokull cannot overcome the one who carries the rune. Not when that one is at full strength.” His jaw flexed.
“But how will this power—you—kill the unkillable?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “That, I will learn when I am the weapon.”
“So you don’t know, can’t be sure, and are relying on rumors or legends?”
“I may not know the semantics, but I’ve seen the rune in action, and I know it will work.” His focus returned to the dome. “My mother loved my father. He was her firebrand. Her everything.” His words came slower now, as if reliving those moments rather than simply retelling them. “But he’d just died, and her heart was as broken as her body. Perhaps more so.”
My throat tightened.
His shoulders lifted with a heavy breath. “As the convergence began, Jokull taunted us with the rune. He’d taken it from its former host upon their death, and he was so confident of his power, he even unlocked her cage. Put the rune in her hand. Dared her to use it. She did.”
The overconfident monster who’d eaten my pinky would absolutely allow a broken woman to activate a power rumored to kill him. Just for the fun of it.
“And my mother… she wasn’t the same woman after she gave her heart to the rune. She drove Jokull out of the kingdom, all that she had the capacity to do at the time, and used the last of her strength before she died to close the dome behind him and keep him out.”