Page 142 of Heart of Thieves

Her heart rate is all over the place. Not a steady beat, but rather the frantic beating of a cicada in a jar, slamming harder and faster, erratic and dangerous and on the verge of ruin.

And I know in that moment it’s because she’s trying to hold part of the magic back for me. Fracturing its power was what made it unstable in the first place.

All of it needs to go in that shard. Even the part keeping me here.

I look past her to my brother, who sways at her side, his eyes full of that icy white light as well, his skin sallow, blood leaking anew from his broken nose.

They’re going to die. Both of them.

As soon as that thought flashes through my mind, I know what I have to do.

I have to face the void. The yawning emptiness I’ve been running from for so long—the emptiness I was willing to cage Lola to keep from having to face.

Somehow it doesn’t terrify me like it should.

Because Lola was right. Loving her doesn’t mean making her love me. I don’t care if she does. I don’t need her to.

I just need her to laugh again. To dance. To spin on her aerial hoop. To scale buildings. To fly.

I need her to live.

So I release her hand and scoop our purple pendant from the floor, draping it around her neck.

I meet her pupilless eyes. She’s staring at me in horror, her hand reaching like she’s trying to stop me, her scream ratcheting higher with panic.

But this is how it has to be. Because even as she begs me not to do this, blood vessels burst around her eyes. Her nose bleeds profusely down her front. Even her ears trickle crimson.

“I’m so sorry. For everything,” I tell her, choking on tears. “Be free.”

Then I press the voratium to Lola’s skin, relinquishing our heart bond.

The white light in the air spills over me like a tidal wave, harder and faster until my legs give out, until my scream tears through my vocal cords, until the world dissolves.

Until nothing remains but stars.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

LOLA

All is quiet. All is dark. All is cold.

The only thing left is the steady thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of my heart with its soothing echo in someone else’s chest, so familiar, so calm.

I do not know where I am or why everything has frozen to numbness, but that feeling of someone else, there in my soul, is a reassurance that, no matter what else happens, I am safe.

I try to stay lost in this place where I cannot remember what brought me here, but the longer I remain, the more hurt feathers at my edges. Loss. Images of my father’s face going slack. Echoes of shouts. Remnants of pain licking through my veins.

And then I see it. An afterimage burned into my brain. Enzo stepping into the light, looking back at me with resolve in his eyes.

Be free.

No. I don’t want to find out where this memory leads. Don’t want to follow where it goes.

But it continues because I have to know, have to see, have to feel the moment when his heartbeat disappears from mine. When his body ripples, becomes light, plunges into me, and then out to the new moon-shard alongside all the power in Laurel’s body.

It is at that instant I realize the second heartbeat in my chest now isn’t the one I know like the back of my own hand. Not the one that would lull me to sleep, that would check in with a gentle tug to see if I was all right. It’s a new heartbeat. One familiar and yet not.

It’s Nic’s.