Luca Kirigan hadn't realised how much of a monster his father was until he was facing down Novokribirsk with chains around his arms. With the city wiped out by his father's own shadows, he fled the country alongside the Sun Summoner and her tracker...
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LUCA COULDN'T REMEMBER how it occurred. One moment, he was standing in front of Freya Helvar, surrounded by a crowd of people during the annual winter fete. The next, a sharp pain tore through him, and he was falling forward. He gasped a breath, his lungs heavy as if filled with water. He was face down on the ground, he realised. The coldness pressing against his forehead was the marble floor of the ballroom. And there was something hot pooling on his back and stomach, and there was an agonizing ache pulsating through him like a second heartbeat.
Freya had tried to catch him, but he'd grown taller than her in the past years, and he was bigger than her in every other way as well. And Saints, how was she meant to carry him? He was faintly aware of her rapid intake of breath beneath him – because that was her beneath him, padding her hands over his back and gripping his silk kefta.
His mouth formed the shape of her name, but he could not bring it to life. He could barely inhale. His eyes burned and his limbs felt as heavy as lead, dead weight just like the rest of him. And then there were hands on him, tugging at him and pulling him off. Nausea swept through him like a tidal wave at the sudden vertigo that followed, and he blinked slowly as the bright light of chandeliers nearly blinded him.
The silhouette of the person above him faded and morphed until it was a person. A person he recognised, if only after a few long seconds. His father knelt above him, and Luca grew increasingly aware of how dire his situation was. Because his father never let himself break his facade of the cold general, but here he was, eyes wild like an animal cornered, pressing his hand into Luca's abdomen, right on top of the wound that must've been gaping, because Saints, there was so much blood.
"You're alright," his father cried, though the sound was muddled and delayed from the movement of his lips. Luca thought he shook his head, because there was no reality in which he was fine, but he couldn't be sure if he even swayed it at all. "Katya, you need to make room for the Healer." It took embarrassingly long for Luca to realise his father wasn't talking to him. His mother was there too somewhere. He could hear her voice. Then he could feel her hand, gripping his limp one.
This time, he did move his head, letting it tilt in the direction he thought she was. It flopped to the side, stopped from cracking painfully on the marble by his father's large hand cupping it from below, shielding it from the hardness of the floor. Katya Kuznetsov looked like a broken thing, tearing at her hair with the fingers not occupying Luca's.
"Don't cry." He thought he said, but there was no sign that his mother understood his words, so it mustn't have been intelligible anyway. He gasped, "Mother." And this time she had to have understood, because she nodded, wiping away at her tears and squeezing his hand tighter.
Foreign hands invaded his body, and he might've felt disgusted had the entire world not been swimming. It's just the Healer, he told himself over and over again until his mind couldn't work any more and the ballroom around him began to fade. Too much blood had spilt out of him. He knew that. A stray tear ran down the side of his face, hot and burning compared to the clamminess of his own body.
