Unsinkable

Epilogue

Six Months Later

The girl knocked on the door— three short raps— then stepped back. The man who stood behind her patted her on the shoulder, as if to comfort her. She made no indication that she had even noticed his touch. She simply held the bundle in her arms closer to her, rocking it back and forth gently.

A few moments later, the door opened, and out stepped a man with bright blue eyes like the sky. He looked as if he had once been serious in nature, but age seemed to have taken that solemnity from him, leaving him with only a kind smile.

"Hello," the man said, his brow furrowing as if to place the girl. "Do I know you?"

She continued to stare, the great sadness within her consuming her as she stared into those eyes. It was not even that she had particularly strong feelings of liking toward Jacin Clay. But seeing his father, and knowing that Jacin would never have the opportunity to melt from his seriousness— never get to be in love with Winter or paint the world around him— made all the events of April come back to her in a rush.

Her mind slipped into that cold night filled with screams that were eventually silenced, remembering the way that everything had been chaos. Then there was Kai— Kai who had promised that they would stick together, that he wouldn't leave her. But he had been the one to betray her— the one to hand her off into her mother's arms and watch with unseeing eyes as she descended into the night. And she never saw him again. No, he did not come back to her. He drowned with the whole lot of them, resting his bones at the bottom of the sea rather than beside her. It was a thought that made her want to scream and cry and be sick all at once. Because he was her Kai; he was the boy whom she had loved for years and years and years. He was the one she would never stop loving. He was her love, now dead at the bottom of the sea.

She tried not to think of him all alone in the night as the black waves came up around him and his arms struggled to find salvation. But every night she dreamed of him sinking beneath the icy water, his final breath abandoning his blue lips and his fingers reaching up toward the sky— reaching out for her.

"Hi," the man stepped around the girl as the seconds of silence grew too long, his million-dollar smile on his face as he stuck out his hand toward Garrison Clay. "I'm Carswell Thorne. And this is my wife Selene."

Garrison continued to smile, though clearly this had not answered any of his questions. Carswell said something more, though Selene couldn't seem to hear his words after his proclamation that she was his wife. It wasn't inaccurate— she was indeed married to Carswell Thorne— but the words seemed to hurt more every time she heard them.

When she and her mother had stepped off the Carpathia in New York, she'd known that Kai was dead. Kai and Winter and Jacin. Rikan and Scarlet and Wolf. All her friends and loved ones gone in a single night. Even Aimery Park was dead, though no tears had been shed over him. Not even Levana, who they'd found on the rescue ship had cried for her step-daughter's suitor.

The three Blackburn women travelled home to Georgia in a blur, with Selene in a haze of mourning as her mother fluttered about her anxiously. She hadn't been home in nearly a year, and seeing the grand Blackburn mansion still standing, the same in every way, only seemed to tear at her heart more. She had done so much in her time since living here— she'd lived a thousand lifetimes of happiness with Kai. But that time was gone, resting forever at the bottom of the Atlantic.

It only took two days of the three women being home before Kingsley Thorne had rung them up. He'd heard everything, and he had a solution. The same solution he'd always had, no matter the happiness that it destroyed on both the part of his son and Selene. Within three weeks they were married. Selene's dress had barely concealed her ever-growing bump.