Chapter 43 Allaster
ALLASTER
ALLASTER FELT AS THOUGH HE HAD SHED A WEIGHT CENTURIES IN the making.
Since the moment he became Assistant Librarian, and Mora had told him the truth of what awaited them both, he had feared the day she would lose herself to the beast. When it finally came, she was chained to a wall in the catacombs, her body changing outside her control.
She had begged Allaster to kill her, and he’d refused, thinking he and a handful of trusted mages could contain her.
He’d only gotten them killed and nearly died himself.
In Mora’s place, he’d known he would get an Assistant he could never trust—except he did trust Kasira.
After everything she had done, all the lies she had told, he would have thought himself incapable.
But he’d thought himself incapable of many things before her.
He’d never thought he would laugh again, for one.
Never thought he would look at someone and feel a yearning so deep it had become a part of him.
When Kasira looked at him, he felt invincible.
Mora had warned him against this. Told him it never ended well when a Librarian and their Assistant grew too close.
How could it, when one was destined to kill the other?
He wanted so badly to trust that they would find a way to subvert the curse, wanted to tell himself that this was not Kasira’s most elegant lie yet.
Perhaps, for a little while, he could just let himself believe it.
“How did you bear it?” Kasira’s voice was rough with an emotion he couldn’t place.
She was staring at the fire now from where they lay curled together on the couch, his magic bound in henolite once more.
He wanted to draw the tension from her like poison from a wound, to take back this responsibility he had hung about her neck, but it was too late.
This was the only way.
“Mora.” Kasira breathed her name like a secret, and it sent him reeling as it always did.
Through memories he’d locked in a pit so deep and dark it felt lifetimes removed.
The day Mora had first connected him to the Library’s magic; the hours he spent mastering the artifact bow under her guidance; their first beast mission to Riviair, where he’d nearly gotten himself killed by a Kilari Bloodpanther protecting her cubs.
The day he’d put an arrow in her heart.
“I don’t know,” Allaster said at last, fingers toying absently with Kasira’s long hair. “I think, in the end, I just didn’t have another choice.”
The Library needed him. Even if all he’d wanted was to flee as far away from what he’d done as possible, he’d had a responsibility to stay. A duty he had sworn himself to and could not turn his back on. But there were times when the pain pulled him down so deep, he wanted to let himself drown.
He released a bone-weary breath. “Sometimes, I think all a person can do is learn to live with the choices they’ve made.
To spend your life wondering about what-ifs …
It’s no life at all.” He felt Kasira tremble against him.
Just once, but enough for him to notice the way her nails were digging into the palms of her hands, her head bowed low.
He’d told her that he had known every time she had lied to him, and he’d meant it.
Because what he’d realized in the confines of that cell was that when she truly felt something, when it was a part of her, it was too big to contain.
For all she had been through, all she had suffered, there was a life in her that would not be snuffed out.
A passion that reminded him of the person he had once been, instead of the jaded hypocrite he had become.
What tore him apart was that he didn’t think she saw it—and he could not be the one to show her.
Their kiss had been a mistake. A moment of weakness he wanted to indulge in again and again.
It had been selfish of him, knowing what he asked of her.
A pleasure he couldn’t allow himself, no matter how badly he wished to.
Because no matter what Kasira believed, or how big she dreamed, this only ended one way.
With her sword in his heart.
TO BE CONTINUED IN
A SANCTUARY OF BEASTS
SPRING 2027