Neither parent moved.
The chamber held its silence the way a held breath holds before the lungs give out, and in the stillness, Amara's tongue dragged another slow line up her mother's throat. Ophira flinched beneath the wet pass but her eyes were no longer on her daughter. They were locked on the reading chair, on the ghost sitting in the crook of a stranger's arm, and the flinch was reflexive because the Duchess's mind had left the bed entirely.
Alastair's mouth hung open around the name he had just spoken. Blood pooled at his lower lip and dripped from his chin onto the pillow, and his gaze would not leave the caramel-haired woman perched on the armored thigh across the room. Twenty years since Ophira wept into his arms and told him a beast had come through the garden, and... The grief that followed had been so complete he buried it beneath a decade of war and never looked back.
She was alive. She was sitting in his bedroom on the leg of a man in dark armor, watching him bleed.
