Working in a dead-end, post office job in the heart of a primarily-Human city, Arya Salcrest cannot let her secret out else she loses her rights and her safety. Norren Sterling, a member of the Council whom she met after a failed museum trip, is det...
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Arya glanced to her chest as soon as the dream flickered off. It was heaving with strangled breaths but otherwise fine. Alive. She's alive. Her head snapped up, enough to find she was still in the warehouse. No surprises there.
She squirmed. The ropes seemed to have gotten tighter around her. Combined with the tight corset she wore, it seemed like the world was intent on making sure she couldn't breathe. The chair she had broken was replaced with one of the upturned, three-legged stools she spied earlier. That meant she wasn't attached to anything.
Should be easy, right? Wrong.
When she shifted ever so slightly, she felt a cold muzzle of a rifle pressed against her back. One flick of the trigger and she'd drop dead. A memory pricked at the back of her mind. Like the girl in her dreams.
Her gut swirled. If the dreams were repeating in her life, then it wasn't going to end well this time around, either. Arya and Norren would drop dead and evil would have won again. Not that Grottway or that adviser with a teeth gap were evil. They simply had things to protect and treasures to lose. Eliott je Clair just happened to get in the adviser's way and now that Arya was tied in a random warehouse with the Maltarci with rifles, Norren seemed to have followed in his previous life's footsteps.
Would Arya follow in the girl's wake as well?
Arya scoffed, earning a sharp gaze from a soldier to her right. If possible, the muzzle dug deeper into her skin. Still, there's no way in Ouine's stinky socks she would let some undead fae soul dictate her life. Damn fate. This was Arya's life, not the girl's. She owned this life at this moment so shouldn't she at least get a say in how she would spend it?
But she couldn't deny the gnawing sense of urgency in her soul. It's like someone had stirred in there and began pounding at the walls of her consciousness. Before the dream ended, Arya swore she heard the girl say her last wish.
Save him.
She's talking about Eliott je Clair, the Crown Prince of the Last Bloodline in the Lezeris Empire before it was overturned and replaced by the New Civils. Arya recalled a distant conversation the girl had with the prince. Like her and Eury, they talked about past lives. Fae souls live on and live again in a different time and place should they have unfinished business or unfulfilled wishes.
Save him. That's certainly a dying wish, an ultimatum on her next life to prevent the same thing from happening again. It was also the same wish that doomed Arya to a cycle of events. A re-do. A blank canvas meant to be painted over with the same picture. That's what this whole thing was.
Save him. If Arya succeeded, would she have her life back? Would she be frto carve out her own path from there?
No one answered her. It's not like anyone knew better than her.
As much as she didn't want to, her knowledge of the dreams' ending put her in a strange position. Sure, she didn't love Norren enough to think of sacrificing her life for him and all that cheesy schtick, but she didn't want him to die just for being associated with her and the destiny tied to her. She didn't want to witness another death if she could help it. Eury's was hard enough. Not Norren too.
