CHAPTER 412: AS YOU WISH
EMBER’S POV
Silas is quiet for a long beat.
“…As you wish, sister.”
The scale flares. The cold, buzzing light reaches across the table and sinks into her.
And I have to sit there, choking on my own tears, and watch my mother die without her heart ever stopping.
I watch the light pull it out of her. I watch the deep, ancient grief drain out of her features drop by drop.
I watch the tension that has lived in her jaw for years smooth out into nothing.
I watch her weep for a thing she is no longer allowed to remember, until the tears on her face are just water on a stranger’s cheeks, meaning nothing at all.
The light snuffs out.
The room plunges back into silence.
Devika blinks. Her spine straightens slightly, the posture of a wealthy woman who has just awoken from a nap in a strange room.
She looks around the blood-stained room with mild, detached puzzlement.
Then, she reaches up and touches her face. Her fingers come away wet.
“…How odd,” she murmurs to herself, her voice perfectly light, completely devoid of the agony that was there ten seconds ago. She lets out a small, embarrassed laugh-a polite, social laugh. A stranger’s laugh. “I seem to have been crying. I can’t imagine why.”
A deep, gut-wrenching sound tears its way out of my throat.
I can’t breathe.
My chest caves in, the absolute finality of it crushing my lungs, and I collapse sideways.
Knox catches me. His massive arms wrap around me, pulling me hard into his chest, and I bury my face in his shirt, shaking so violently my teeth chatter.
I am sobbing, loud and ugly and completely broken, mourning a woman who is sitting less than three feet away from me.
I can’t explain why it hurts this much. Why it feels like a serrated blade has been sunk directly into my chest, hooking into my veins and pulling my entire ribcage inside out.
Perhaps because, through all my life, the single most consistent thing in my world was Devika.
Even if I didn’t have a mother, I had her. I had someone to hate. I had a focal point for all my blame.
In the nosi twisted, sickening way, she had been the most permanent fixture in my life, so much so that Ter absence cast the biggest shadow.
When Maurice crawled into a bottle and never came out, she was there, with her cruel, fussing words and her vain, shallow interests. She was always there.

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