Chapter 71
Skylenna
Present Day
I shut Krimson’s bedroom door quietly.
He has been trying all night, making himself sick to reach his sister. After hours of migraines, crying, panicking…we rested our eyes in his room.
But the nightmares were a tornado terrorizing my brain. Images of my daughter locked away in the harshest events of our past.
The hardwood is cold and slightly tacky beneath my bare feet.
I move carefully, avoiding the loose board near the hallway that always groans if I step too hard.
The counter smells faintly of yesterday’s grounds—bitter and burnt.
I reach for my favorite chipped mug, running my thumb over the cracked rim out of habit.
While the kettle warms, I drift to the wooden table and stare at the grooves carved into its surface, following the scratches and dents with my eyes like they might lead somewhere else. I don’t sit. I don’t move. I just stand there, hollow, watching dust float through the thin morning light.
At some point, I begin pacing. Three steps to the sink.
Turn. Four back toward the fridge. Again.
Again. The room blurs at the edges, the hum of the pipes ticking, the wind pouring across the windows into a dull static as I sink into the quiet void.
The search has been endless. It’s rubbing my mind raw, causing small fissures of open flesh.
The clock above the stove clicks, jumping ahead more than it should.
I tiptoe to the kitchen to make coffee. The golden sun beams through the split curtains, trickling across the dusty shelf over the fireplace. I walk over to it. My daughter’s stunning eyes in that middle family photograph hit me like a train.
I am a failure, and Dessin would be ashamed of me.
He would have figured this all out. They don’t need me. They need him.
“Fuck!” I hiss, slamming my hand against it.
The frame flips off the shelf, clattering to the wooden floor. As I reach down to grab it, hoping the noise doesn’t wake Krimson, I realize I don’t even remember this picture…
The kids are seven or eight years old. I’m kissing Krimson on the head. And Sapphire is in the arms of…
The frame slips from my hands.
Glass shatters with broken shards sprinkling like tiny blades over my bare feet.
The sound of time ceasing to exist.
Of bones breaking.
My pulse is calcified in my throat.
He… No… He wasn’t there…
This has to be a part of so many of the dreams I have about him. I am still sleeping in my son’s room.
His face looks back at me in that photograph, littered with broken glass.
And I feel it everywhere.
My ribs, my teeth, the hollow place below my sternum where grief and hopelessness have been quietly rotting for decades.
“Dessin…”
Christ, it hurts to say his name. Not just hearing it sift through my ears, but to call out to him as though he may just answer.
To feel that gnawing pit of hope again.
My eyes lift to the shelf slowly, stinging from not blinking.
And my body goes numb before igniting on fire.
He. Is. In. Every. Photo.
The day I gave birth. Kane holding Krimson up to his face.
Our wedding day under the Red Oaks. Kane.
Sapphire’s first time climbing a tree. Dessin.
Family day in the lagoon. Aquarus.
Krimson and Sapphire’s first day of school. Dessin.
He. Is. Everywhere.
“Oh my god.” My knees hit the ground; split and bleeding.
Not real. Not real. Just a dream. Is it? Yes. Not real!
The woman who loved Dessin and all of their alters was murdered the day he fell into that coma. Her soul tied to his, burned at the stake and gone. Gone. Gone.
The ashes of that woman fuse back into a familiar form.
Resurrecting and searching for him…
“Dessin…is this real?” I whisper, hand trembling over my mouth.
I won’t let myself lose tears. Not yet. Not now.
Not real. Not real. Not real.
Could be a trick. Mind phantoms. A sweet, aching, longing, tragic dream.
But I focus on the photograph again. Our wedding day. Kane’s yearning, so insanely, cataclysmically in love gaze.
And it knocks the air from my lungs.
“Dessin.” His name gains another heartbeat of life in my mind.
I stand up, holding the fireplace shelf for support.
“Kane…” It makes its way past a whisper.
Chills explode up my back as I see a man standing by the windowsill, staring out at the endless red trees and shimmering lagoon. Hands in pockets. Black slacks and dress shirt.
I know right away it’s not the love of my life.
In fact, the man standing with his back to me isn’t even alive.
“Kaspias?”
Kane’s brother glances at me from over his shoulder, a peaceful smile plays over his mouth. There are no words exchanged. He merely turns back to the window and continues looking ahead.
I choke on a laugh of whimper as my body ruptures with a reckoning. An irrevocable urgency to scour heaven and hell to find him. A blinding perseverance I haven’t been possessed by since the day he went to sleep and did not wake up.
The world around me dissolves to the background like a fading nightmare.
A shockwave pulses through my chest, and I fly forward.
My bare feet pound against the floor, and I do not open the front door—I burst through it.
No room for careful grief. I sprint with confidence. With certainty.
I am an arrow released into the Red Oaks.
“Dessin!” I scream to the open woods.
Please, God. Please, God. I beg of you! I beg of you! Show me mercy! GIVE HIM BACK TO ME!
A divine animal in my chest snarls and digs its claws into the earth, willing to rip every tree from this earth…just to see him. Just once.
For his brown eyes to be open.
To look into mine.
“Dessin!” A shrill, unbecoming scream ripples across the treetops.
My sprint locks into my place, dying into the dry dirt as someone stops me in my path.
Off to the side, a woman and her son hold hands, watching me with the purest, most sincere looks of peace and overwhelming happiness.
It’s Sophia and little Arthur.
The doubt in my soul vanishes at the heavenly sight.
They peer at me on this beautiful morning with misty eyes.
“Sophia…” I say with a lump in my throat. “Is he…”
Kane’s mother grins.
My feet move again before I can think. My heart a banging war drum. Twigs scratch against my skin, tearing open spots of my dress. The earth rolls back. The sky peels open.
“DESSIN!” I bellow at the top of my lungs.
I duck under branches and leap over protruding roots.
There is no world where I walk.
I move like fire consumes a field of dead crops.
My mind hiccups. Briefly shuts down. Goes blank.
There.
A few strides away.
His name unable to move past my lips.
Real. Real. Real.
Death looms close by as the whole of my heart threatens to stop beating.
Dessin.
“My god,” I whisper.
The love of my life stands among a pile of chopped wood. A gentle morning breeze moves through his brown hair. Sweat glistens over his bare chest.
He is the axis to which I move.
He always was.
He lifts his concentrated gaze slowly, like waking from a dream he never expected to escape.
Dessin.
Dark mahogany eyes slam into me.
I double over. Unearthed and uprooted at the silent killing and resurrection that becomes me from getting to look into those eyes again.
“Skylenna…” My soulmate’s face breaks.
That voice, all-knowing and unlike any other.
It’s home.
I wail like the grieving widow I’ve been all these years.
In three versions, he sees me in the dirt—the one who fought for him to remember me in that prison, the one who mourned him even though he never died, and the one who kept going, first out of spite.
Then, because our babies didn’t deserve to have a mother who couldn’t let go of his memory.
Who loved a ghost more than them.
Across the open area of woods, he witnesses me crumble.
And his body collides with mine. On his knees in the dirt, slamming my upper body to his. Dessin folds himself so tightly around my pain, I can’t decide if I’ve died and this is heaven.
“D-D-Dessin! Oh god!” I bawl into his shoulder.
A long-since fossilized bit of my heart takes its first breath as my one true love says my name. Over and over and over again.
“Do you remember?!” I gasp and sob simultaneously. “The c-coma!”
He kisses the side of my head furiously. “I remember.”
I cry harder, releasing every lonely moment I spent in my bedroom closet sobbing into a pillow so Sapphire and Krimson wouldn’t hear.
I cry for every second I sat at his bedside and prayed for God to give him back.
I cry for the long days of pregnancy when I would feel a kick and have a breakdown that Dessin wasn’t awake to feel it too.
I cry my children.
I cry for DaiSzek.
I cry for Dessin and every single one of his alters.
“Sapphire—she time traveled. She changed something! She saved you!” I am in utter disbelief that Dessin is holding me in his arms. That he’s taking on my breakdown as his home. That’s here. He’s with me.
He is awake.
“I know, baby. I’ve been here. I’ve been here to see it all…” Dessin says, low and gravelly against my ear.
“What?!”
“You couldn’t see me, but I know you felt my presence. I saw the birth of our children. I watched you cry all alone when they’d go to sleep at night. I was holding you while you slept. I never missed a conversation when you’d hold my hand and tell me about your day.”
“Oh!” I claw at his back, unable to get enough of him.
The love that pours out of me is infinite, rich in power, and absolute.
“Twenty-one years, Dessin…you were gone… It was so hard. I—died inside.”
Dessin pulls me a centimeter away to look me in the eyes.
The bridge of his nose brushes the tip of mine, and the chemistry is still there—only now, it’s a dam losing its foundation, swelling over to wipe out anything in sight.
It’s twenty-one years of being apart. The unbearable longing to have him touch me every second of every day is destroying my mind, spiraling my thoughts out of control.
“You did so good. You raised our babies, and you did so fucking good, Skylenna.”