It was like moving through a dream, climbing upward towards the light. What remained of the Citadel was shockingly close, Svana having arranged her torture near the very place Claire had been forced to call home.
The war, the rebels, they were right in front of her, all around her. Gunfire, explosions, screams, but all she could feel was Shepherd. He’d been right there the whole time.
She walked as steady as she could, but tripped over the mangled body of one of Shepherd’s Followers. The cracked marble steps, those same steps she’d walked up the day she met Shepherd, were only across one last barrier. She opened her eyes, realizing she had almost fallen asleep, and knew all she had to do was crawl through the field of corpses and pull herself up to where she felt her mate’s great pain.
That was what gave her the strength to move again, to crawl forward even as the ground shook, and huge chunks of the Citadel began to fall off.
None of it mattered. There was only time for Shepherd.
Claire continued forward.
Her love was so close, and there were only a few more stairs to manage. Claire pulled herself up that last step, resting against the nearest pillar to catch her breath.
Her vision swam just as another corner of the Citadel began to crumble.
The great door was before her. Claire shuffled through blood and glass, finding her legs again, ignoring the way her bare feet felt each shard. And there he was, twenty meters, ten, five...
On his back, still as a corpse, Shepherd lay.
Half-dead, she went to him, saw his silver eyes find hers and fill with horror as he took in what she’d become. All her black hair was matted with blood and fluids, the corners of her mouth torn and crusted. There was so much damage, a river of fresh bright red trickling down her battered legs, smeared from her journey on her thighs.
Falling to her knees at his side, she tried to speak his name, voice hoarse, to call out to the man bleeding and trembling as if trying to move. But he was badly hurt, bright red, seeping from under his charred armor.
There was a noise in his throat, those silver eyes trying to express love past the panic.
Pawing his face, seeing that her fingers were gnarled and swollen, Claire whimpered in grief as she tried to crawl over him. “Svana took our son from my body. She gave me to three monsters, Shepherd.”
One large hand twitched, Claire knew he wanted to hold her, but could not. So she lifted it to rest on her hip, splayed over him, pressed to his side where his armor was black and burnt.
She sought comfort from a dying man who could hardly bend his fingers to grip her hip.
Whatever had damaged him, she did not have the power to see. Claire’s fading attention found only the wet, silver eyes pleading with her as they grew dim, heard the wrongness of Shepherd’s far too spaced apart breaths.
The last of her life drained from between her legs in a pool of red, Claire sagged, her ear above where his heart should have been beating.Thólos earned its freedom, Shepherd’s tyranny ended, and Brigadier Dane wrestled control of the resistance from the few surviving members of Leslie Kantor’s rebel contingent.
With no one willing to share the true story behind the uprising, unfitting as it was, it was Dane who was lauded by the public as the hero who’d saved them all.
When a hasty election placed her in the lifetime appointed position as Premier, Corday kept his silence.
What Thólos needed was solidarity, focus. They also needed to come to terms with the fact that despite round the clock cleanup crews picking through the Citadel’s rubble, the virus was still unaccounted for.
To survive the cold, the population moved underground, daylight hours barely warm enough to conduct repairs to the Dome’s infrastructure and search for necessities.
What happened in the Undercroft, the life of the people forced down there, was not worth speaking of. It was no life at all.
Until the Dome was repaired, there was no other option.
In the months of toil underground, Corday wore the ring, never once slipping the golden band off. He’d developed a nervous habit where he twisted it so hard it bit into the webbing between his fingers. He wanted it to hurt; he would never let himself forget what she’d given, how she’d suffered... how he’d failed her.
Not after the way the masses portrayed Claire O’Donnell as a traitor, not after the government inquest and the amount of times he’d given testimony for the girl on the flyer.
To the public, verbally crucifying a dead Leslie Kantor as a traitor was not enough, confirmation Shepherd had been killed, insufficient. They wanted the culpability of the living. Who better than the dead terrorist’s mate, the one found half-dead and draped lovingly over his body.