Chapter 41 #2
“Isla,” I whispered her name as the first tears began to fall. “Isla, no. Please, no.”
I pulled myself up onto the bed behind her and gathered her into my arms. I shook my head, blonde curls and tears obscuring my vision as I looked down at her cold, pale face and wondered which gods to blame for this, which gods to curse for this cruelty.
At the moment, it didn’t matter. Maybe it never truly had.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my wife as I stroked her hair, as my tears dripped down to her face and ran down her cheeks in mockery of her own. “I failed. I failed you. I’m so sorry.”
I buried my face in her copper hair and wept, shaking both of us with the force of my sobs.
There was a gaping hole in my soul growing bigger, wider, with every passing moment she was no longer here with me.
And as I realized I’d never again hear her laugh, see her put her hands on her hip in that way she did when she was mad at me, watch her flip her hair over her shoulder absentmindedly, I raised my gaze to the hair pin and thought about going with her.
Maybe if there were gods, there was a place beyond as well.
Maybe I could find her again and we could discover divinity together for all eternity. Maybe…
I reached for the pin but someone spoke before my fingers could close around it.
“Geist,” Pax swore.
I didn’t react and didn’t even move when he approached us. Cleo was beside him, covered in blood I wasn’t sure wasn’t hers. Her gaze dropped to Isla and she inhaled sharply.
Clutching my wife, I looked up into Cleo’s eyes and asked. “Nascha?”
Her jaw clenched and the tears I now noticed streaking through the blood on her cheeks answered my question for me.
“I–I was too late,” she said, voice hoarse. “I left her door for only a few minutes, just long enough to grab some dinner downstairs. I never thought…”
She trailed off with a distance in her eyes I recognized. Trauma, guilt, grief.
Pax started speaking quickly then, keeping his voice low and checking the corners and windows and closets as if expecting another snake to be laying in wait.
He theorized this was a planned hit organized by the Vipers, a way to weaken us before the true House war could begin, a way to repay us for my insolence as Heir and Olympia’s crimes against them and whatever else.
I wasn’t listening. I knew my cousin was speaking and the words floated over to me on occasion but I didn’t hear a word of it as I stared down at my wife’s face, frozen in death.
I was stroking her hair, I realized. When had I begun doing that?
Colby came careening into the room just as Pax was trying to coax us all out and to somewhere he thought was safe, limping and covered in blood from head to toe. Pax’s eyes widened at the sight of him.
“What in the Geist’s name–” Pax demanded, straightening.
“They got inside,” Colby gasped out. “A whole group of them, all of them, they forced their way inside and just started attacking, killing. I tried to save Irene. Milo, I tried to save your mom but one of them shoved me aside and then Helena jumped in front of her and it–I tried–I–”
The blow struck and rolled off of me in waves as my soul absorbed another loss. My wife, my grandmother, my mother. All dead.
“Where are they now?” Pax interrupted, stepping forward with a blade covered in blood.
“Gone,” Colby replied. “We killed enough of them that they just…gave up and left. Elias and Lincoln are going through the House, making sure there aren’t more, and Blair is locking down the gate but we weren’t…they just came in and started killing. We weren’t ready. We didn’t think–”
I’d heard enough. My father was out with my Uncle Elias, hunting down the rest, likely on a path of vengeance I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. It was over. We hadn’t known it was coming and now it was over, with a number of ours dead I didn’t even want to consider.
I rose, lifting Isla and cradling her in my arms. Her head slumped forward to rest against my chest, face hidden by the copper curtain of hair which had come unbound from her braid.
The bird pin clattered to the floor as her arms dangled down.
I gripped her behind her back and under her knees, carrying her like a man should carry his bride.
“Milo, wait–” Pax began, stepping forward.
But I pushed past him, carrying Isla to the door where the others were gathered. They stepped aside, wide eyed, the moment I appeared in the threshold, and did not try to stop me as I carried my deceased wife down the hall.
“Where are you going?” Pax called out from behind me.
I didn’t answer him. I just turned the corner and kept walking, doing everything in my power to ignore the blood staining the walls around me, dripping from my hands, and trailing from my wife’s throat.
I was only capable of going through the motions, completing the next step I knew must be done.
If I stopped, I would break apart. I would shatter into a million pieces and never be whole again.
So I just kept going, on to the next step.
And that was to visit the only man who might grieve this woman as much as I did, the only man who could help me now.