Chapter 350 Every Time. He Said Every Fucking Time.

River saw him before he saw her.

She was on her knees, held by two dark Fae soldiers, fifty yards from Atlas’s body. Her wrists were bound with dark-magic restraints that pulsed against her skin, and the pink glow of her eyes was building behind them with a pressure that the restraints were visibly failing to contain.

She saw Tristan cross the clearing. She saw the dark veins covering his face, his neck, his hands. She saw the combat armor holding his body together when his body had abandoned the effort. She saw him cut through two more soldiers with a blade that was shaking in a hand that shouldn’t have been able to hold it.

She saw the spear.

It came from behind. A dark Fae soldier, positioned in the treeline at Tristan’s back, threw a pike augmented with the same dark magic that was already killing him. The weapon entered below his left shoulder blade and exited through his chest, and the impact drove him forward three steps before his legs understood they were done.

“NO.”

The scream that came from River shook the trees.

Tristan’s knees hit the ground. His hands found the shaft of the spear protruding from his chest, and his fingers closed around it, and the green in his eyes, the last fragment of color the corruption hadn’t reached, flared once, bright and defiant and beautiful, and then faded.

He looked up. Across the clearing, through the chaos and the fire and the bodies, his eyes found hers.

He smiled.

The smile was the worst part. It was the smile from the corridor, the wall, the garden, the smile of a boy who had found a girl on a rock and had spent every moment since making sure she knew she was found. It was the smile he had given her the first time he made her laugh, the same architecture, the same warmth, transplanted onto the face of a dying man who was looking at the love of his life for the last time and had decided that the last thing she would see from him would be the first thing he ever gave her.

“I would find you every—”

He fell.

River screamed.

The restraints on her wrists shattered.

The soldiers holding her flew backward as if struck by a detonation, their bodies hitting trees thirty feet away with a force that broke the trees.

Pink magic erupted from River’s body in a column that reached the canopy and kept going, a pillar of light so bright the entire forest went white. It was so powerful the ground beneath her cracked in concentric circles that spread outward across the clearing.

The magic was grief. It was fury. It was twelve years of a girl finally becoming everything she had been holding back, and the power of it was staggering.

Dark Fae soldiers within a hundred yards disintegrated. The ones with augmented magic screamed as the pink light burned through their enhancements and reached the Fae underneath, and the Fae underneath died.

Loyalist soldiers, the ones who had followed Tristan, felt the magic differently. It washed over them like warm water, engulfed them in pink, sealed wounds, restored strength. The pink wrapped around their bodies in a protective barrier that absorbed every dark-magic attack that followed.

River crawled to Tristan.

Her hands found his face. She turned it toward her. The dark veins were still. His eyes were open. The gray in them was total, and the smile was gone, and the boy who had declared her birthday and named her River and told her on a wall that he would find her every time was dead, and the woman holding him couldn’t fix it.

She poured the pink magic into him. Every ounce of it. Every drop of the power that had just leveled a forest and killed thirty soldiers and protected every loyalist on the field. She pushed it through her hands and into his chest and willed it to heal him, demanded it, begged it, and the magic obeyed everything she asked except the one thing she needed.

It wouldn’t bring him back.

“Please,” she whispered, and the word was the same word she had said at the shrine, and the answer was the same silence. “Please, Tristan. You said every time. You promised. You said you would find me every time.”

He didn’t answer.

River pressed her forehead to his. Her tears fell on his face, and the pink magic fading from her palms caught the tears and turned them into small points of light that drifted upward into the canopy like stars being returned to the sky by a woman who had no more use for them.

“Come back,” she whispered. “I will let you hand flowers to furniture for the rest of my life. I will toast Lucian at every picnic. I will hold your book right-side up for you. Come back. Please come back.”

He was gone.

Behind River, surrounded by the fading pink glow, Vesper Willow was alive.

She should have been dead. When a fated mate dies, the fated bond delivers a killing shock to the surviving mate. It was law. It was nature. It was the mechanism through which the Moon Goddess ensured that fated ties were honored in death as they were in life.

Vesper was standing.

Breathing. Whole. Untouched by the death of the man she claimed the Goddess had given her.

The pink magic that had killed dark Fae soldiers on contact had wrapped around Vesper and done nothing.

She glanced down at the pink, stunned.

Elder Maren, who had followed the prince to the field because he was old and stubborn and believed that elders belonged where kings fell, saw it. His eyes widened. His mouth opened. The words forming behind his lips were the words of a man who had just witnessed an impossibility that rewrote everything the council had argued for.

A blade entered his throat from behind.

One of Willow’s soldiers, positioned at the elder’s back, shoved dark metal through his neck with the clinical efficiency of a man executing an order rather than making a decision.

Elder Maren’s mouth stayed open.

The words he would have spoken, the truth that would have changed everything, died with him on a field that had already taken a king.