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, blood 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 crimson, 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.