Page 64 of Leila’s Legacy

Fire.

Her chest was on fire. Alight with the need to breathe. The need for air.

The need, the need, the need.

The desperation was clawing, scrambling over her resolve like a sharp taloned beast. She sucked in as though she could bring in air. Except it was not air. It was water, and it only made everything burn more brilliantly.

Her legs kicked against the bottom of the river and her lungs tried desperately to breathe. Pain. In her throat in her chest, in her eyes, her head. Her moving feet slipped over something and kicked again.

This time she found purchase and shoved. A barrier held her shoulders and kept her down.

Niall’s face above her was no longer set in a mask of steely determination. It had crumpled with the pain she felt resonating through her. Loss. The only emotion more powerful than love.

Niall.

The Lion.

Was this a vision?

Confusion swirled in her mind.

Her lungs ached with an intense agony she could not bear. She needed to stand up. To breathe.

Don’t struggle.

Why would she not struggle? She shoved harder, but the resistance at her shoulders did not yield. She had to breathe.

She grabbed at the pressure on her shoulders. Wrists. Hands. Someone was shoving her down. She tried to wrest the person’s grip off her.

The Lion.

Panic ran like poison through her veins. She couldn’t breathe. Air. She needed air.

She clawed at the arms holding her, raking her newly grown nails over tender skin. Her vision came in flashes, the sky beyond the shadow of her mind, a face visible between the thrashing of her hands and the churning water.

Golden hair. Hazel eyes. She’d know the handsome face of the Lion anywhere.

The man she would love. The man who would kill her.

Her thoughts slowed, too difficult to focus on and her limbs too tired to fight against the weight of the water. The world began to dim.

A warm tingle started at her neck and washed through her. She fell into the familiar sensation, allowing the calm to ease through her tortured body.

Visions flashed in her eyes, the way a brilliant sun flares between leaves in a copse of trees. It was a lifetime of them: the past, the present, the future. The attack on Werrick Castle, her mother’s screams, the siege, the great pestilence, all of it.

The man in a cottage who vowed to poison another. Witches. That vision lingered longer than the others. The Lion. He shoved her under the water, holding her. He carried her to the bed, loving her.

Finally, the last of the visions crawled to an end as the world began to fade. One final spark, a glimmer of a vision she had never before seen, whispered through her dying brain. One so beautiful and so precious that she tucked it against her heart as it stopped beating.