Chapter 3

"How dare you."

That did it. Izael was the King of Nightfall Court, and nobody had ever humiliated him in public before.

He came to his feet, and black magic rolled off him in waves. The pressure alone dropped the nobles to their knees. A few of them could barely breathe.

I stayed exactly where I was and looked at him. I didn't even flinch.

That was when Noah bolted out from behind me.

I don't know where a five-year-old finds that kind of courage. He hit Lilith's leg like a furious little lion and sank his teeth into her wrist.

"You leave my mommy alone! You're a bad woman!"

"My hand!" Lilith shrieked and shook her arm, but she couldn't get him off.

Izael saw the blood. His face went to ice.

"Get off her, you filthy halfbreed."

He swept his hand through the air, and a blast of shadow magic slammed into my son's small body.

Noah went flying like a kite with a cut string. He hit one of the stone pillars, hard, and dropped to the ground.

Blood came out of his mouth. He curled up on the stones and shook.

Everything stopped.

My blood went cold. For half a second I forgot how to breathe.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry, either. I just crossed the garden fast and got my arms under him.

His body was cold. His breathing had almost nothing left in it.

"Mommy... it doesn't hurt..." He got his eyes open and touched my cheek with one bloody little hand.

I took hold of his fingers. A thin gold light came out of my palm, and I hadn't told it to. It ran down his arm and into his chest and settled around his heart.

Then I stood up, and I turned around, and I looked at Izael.

He knew he'd hit too hard. I saw his hand tremble, just slightly.

Then he glanced at the teeth marks on Lilith's wrist, and whatever it was in his face closed right back up.

"He brought this on himself," he said. "A half-human embarrassment, biting a moon elf. This is how you've raised him, Aria."

I looked at him. There was nothing in me at all. It was like looking at a corpse.

"Izael." I didn't raise my voice, but every person in that garden heard me. "From this moment, my son belongs to me and no one else. He has nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with Nightfall Court."

He stopped for a beat. Then he laughed at me.

"You're cutting ties? Aria, do you have any idea who you're talking to?" His chin came up. "Without me, a useless human with no magic and a half-dead brat won't last three days out there."

He bent down and picked Lilith up. He never looked at Noah again, not once.

"I'm taking her to be healed. Use the time to think about how stupid you've been. When I come back, I want to find you on your knees in the courtyard."

Then he left with his nobles trailing after him, and he didn't look back.

I watched them go, and my mouth curved.

Think about it?

No. It was time to end it.

I picked Noah up and carried him back to our rooms.

The second the door shut behind me, I closed my eyes and stopped holding back the strange thing that had woken up in me the night before.

Gold light tore out of my body and filled the room. The shadow wards around us broke like wet paper.

I looked around the place where I'd spent five years of my life.

The clothes in the wardrobe he'd handed down to me. The cheap jewelry on the dresser. The portrait on the wall, the one he painted himself back when he still wanted to make me happy.

All of it made me sick.

"Herald," I said.

"I'm here, Your Radiance." Gold light gathered in the middle of the room.

"Clean this place out." I looked around one more time. "I don't want a single trace left in this world that Noah and I ever existed here. Our scent, our body heat, a fallen hair, a speck of dust. All of it. Gone."

"As you command."

Starfire swept through the room.

There was no smoke and there was no sound. Everything that had ever been ours simply stopped being.

Even the air we'd breathed was pulled out of the room.

Then I lifted my son into my arms and stepped through the golden portal.