Chapter198:The Goddess’s Gift

|| Alaric's POV || The healers said I should rest. I tore the throat out of the first one who tried to pull me from her bedside. They stopped suggesting it after that. The room smelled of blood and dying flowers. Someone— probably that fool Ezra— kept replacing the wilted moon blooms on the windowsill, as if their rotting petals could somehow sweeten the stench of death clinging to my mate. I counted her breaths. Eleven seconds between each. Too slow. Too shallow. Endora's warning slithered through my mind like poison: "The dagger's curse lingers." My claws dug into the armrests of the chair I'd dragged to Lilac's bedside. The wood splintered beneath my grip. Fourteen seconds. I was on my feet before the next inhale, my palm pressed to the too-cold skin of her chest. The steady thump-thump of her heartbeat beneath my fingertips was the only thing keeping Hunter from tearing free and painting the walls with my grief. They brought me food I didn't eat. Reports I didn't read. My father ca