She exhaled softly, her eyes fluttering shut as peace fell across her face. “Good.” Her chest rose. “That’s… good.”
Her chest never fell.
Endless seconds seemed to pass as Nikhail stared at Isobel’s face. He reached over, drawing her eyes closed with two fingers.
“She’s gone.” His words seemed to echo all around him.
A heavy weight settled on him. One by one, each of the soldiers came and pressed a hand to Isobel’s shoulder. An act of solidarity and grief as they acknowledged her death. Some murmured prayers, while others offered words of encouragement for her passage from this life to the next.
She didn’t need to die. If they’d done things differently, she could’ve still been alive.
The weight of Isobel’s passing remained with Nikhail for the rest of the day and long into the night. He couldn’t get her lifeless brown eyes out of his head. Not as they cleared the rest of the castle—as a group, this time. Not when they found another horde of vampires and managed to capture one alive. Not even as they stayed at Castle Sanguis well into the next day, collecting every scrap of evidence they uncovered.
No. Those brown eyes, so eerily similar to River’s, that hehad to remind himself several times that his water fae was nowhere near the vampires’ fortress, followed him even after he left Castle Sanguis.
When Nikhail finally reached his accommodations and wearily climbed into the shower, he scrubbed his skin raw. The water ran red, then brown, and he only stopped when it was clear and all traces of death were gone. He dried himself off, pulling on a pair of sweats and climbing into bed.
His eyes were heavy, and exhaustion was pulling at him, but he wasn’t ready to sleep yet. Plugging in his phone, Nikhail navigated to his contacts and dialed the only person who would bring him peace.
“Hello?” River’s voice was soft on the other end of the line.
The sound of her voice, and the storm contained within it, was a balm to his turbulent soul. The part of him that had been desperate for River since the day they met relaxed, and his eyes eased shut. This was exactly what he’d needed—they’d texted, but he hadn’t spoken to her since the solarium.
“Hi, princess. It’s good to hear your voice.”
There was a pause, and then River mentioned to someone that she would take this call. Her voice was muffled as a door shut behind her. “It’s good to hear yours, too.”
She sounded… surprised by that. Or maybe it was just his exhaustion talking.
“I needed to talk to you,” he told her. “I miss you.”
He’d never missed anyone this much, not even his mother and sisters. It was as if he’d left part of his heart back in the solarium with River.
“Are you still on the job?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah.” Those lifeless eyes flashed through his mind again, and he scrubbed a hand over his face, his head falling back onthe pillow. “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be here. Two weeks, maybe a bit longer.”
So much for returning to Lakewater soon.
River hitched a breath. “What about Ryker and Brynleigh’s bonding ceremony? Will you be able to make it?”
“Of course. I’d never miss it.”
He hadn’t been surprised when Ryker had pulled him aside after the meeting at the Hub and shared about the bonding. Although fae mating bonds weren’t often enacted between their kind and other species, it wasn’t unheard of. Folklore from before the Great Migration spoke of mating bonds between fae and humans. If they could bond with a human, why not a vampire?
Besides, if anyone in Nikhail’s life was ready for such a monumental occasion, it was Ryker and Brynleigh. The pair were meant to be together. Anyone who spent more than a few minutes with the couple could see that their connection ran deeper than their wedding vows.
The mating bond would just be an outward symbol of what they already knew.
“Oh, good.” River paused, and he sensed that she was about to hang up and get back to work. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet, wasn’t ready to stop hearing her voice.
“I had a bad day, River,” he admitted quietly, thinking back to his stint in the hospital when he’d told her that being shot was merely the day going sideways. “A really bad day.”
It had been a long time since he’d had such a horrible one. Not since he got the scars on his chest. There was just something so appalling about humans dying young. Their lives were already so short. So fleeting.
“Are you hurt,Nik?”
“No, River. I’m fine. But…”