“Will you forgive me?” Valen asked. “I’m begging you, Nor. Forgive me, and turn your focus back to the mission. We started this together. I’d like to end it together, too.”

She wanted to. Godstars, she truly did.

And she was about to tell him, when Valen coughed.

He lifted a hand to his mouth, to cover it.

But Nor saw the blood that trickled down his chin.

“Valen, you’re—”

Her brother doubled over, coughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. Nor rushed over to him, realizing with horror that there was a puddle of blood on the ground, pooling from his lips.

“Medics!” Nor shouted as he collapsed to the floor. “Darai, get help!”

The adviser rushed from the room, and Nor knelt before Valen, her hands on either side of his face. “Breathe, Valen.” She willed her compulsion into him, but his eyes were wild as he retched and gasped for air. “Breathe!”

A medical droid and one of the estate’s doctors, a Tenebran woman whose body was modded to look like metal, entered. “Move aside, Majesty,” she said sternly, though not with any lack of respect.

Her med droid, with its clawlike arms wired for strength, lifted Valen’s body onto the floating stretcher. His coughing had slowed, but he still gasped for air, his chest rattling as if it were full of fluid.

“Nor,” he gasped.

His eyes met hers, wild as a cornered animal.

But she had no words to soothe him as the doctor ordered him from the room, already hooking machines up to his chest and waving a diagnostic wand across his middle, a holo floating above to show her the problems it discovered within his dying body. The droid directed the floating stretcher from the office, and Valen was gone.

The silence that followed was almost painful.

Nor felt as if she’d just seen Zahn dying all over again. The memory of his face...it morphed into Valen, and she saw the two of them, side by side in a grave.

A hand touched Nor’s elbow.

She flinched, thrown back into the present, where she realized she was still kneeling on her office floor, her breathing haggard as she tried to hold herself together.

“I know it pains you to see him this way, even with what he has done,” Darai said to her, as he held out a hand. “But the boy must be used to power Nexus, before it is too late.”

“I can’t,” Nor choked out. “I can’t lose them both.”

She wanted to hate Valen, because hating him would mean not having to deal with the loss of him once he was gone.

But she couldn’t. He was her brother, and he’d saved her, just as he’d said. And he would save her again, even if it killed him inside. Even if it killed a piece of her heart.