Chapter 21: Midnight

Cassian's POV

I caught her before she touched the boards.

She was light and warm and loose in my arms, and her head fell back over my elbow.

The last stroke of midnight was still going out across the water.

"Linnet."

She did not answer.

I laid her down on the dock and put my ear to her chest.

Nothing.

I put two fingers under her jaw, where her pulse had been faint and fast all week.

Nothing there either.

The black lines were gone.

I turned her arm over in the lamplight and looked at the skin from the wrist to the elbow.

It was clean.

It was smooth and pale, with a few faint freckles I had forgotten, and no mark on it at all.

The Wane had finished.

It had taken everything it came for, and then it had let go.

"No," I said.

I said it quietly, at first.

"No. You don't get to. Not after all of it."

Someone knelt on the other side of her.

It was Connie Ashgrove, with the shotgun lying forgotten in the wet.

She took her daughter's hand and held it against her mouth.

She made a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

"Baby," she said. "Baby, baby."

I started breathing for Linnet.

I pinched her nose and covered her mouth with mine and blew.

Her chest rose and fell, and I did it again.

I kept the rhythm.

I had never tried to save anyone in my life, and I kept going.

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