She needed to know what her future held with Kellan. More than anything, she needed some glimmer of hope that they could, somehow, overcome the trouble they were in and find a way to be together.
She shot a glance over her shoulder, toward the foot of the bed. Her eyes lit on the trunk that rested there on the floor. The trunk that held Kellan’s grandmother’s mirror.
No. It was dangerous even to consider it.
She didn’t even know if it would work.
And yet she reached for her empty contact lens case on the night table beside the bed, then her feet were moving her silently across the floor, carrying her to the wooden locker. She crouched down in front of it. Silently lifted the lid.
The silver hand mirror lay facedown on top of a stack of Kellan’s shirts. Mira picked it up, her fingertips brushing over the carved design of the Archer family emblem.
She had to try.
She had to know, even if it terrified her to do this, something she’d never attempted before. The worse terror was not knowing, fearing that what Kellan saw might actually be his fate.
If there was any chance that looking into her own unprotected gaze might give her even a slim hope of a future together with Kellan, she would risk anything. She would pay any price to know for certain if he was destined to live . . . or doomed to die.
Mira pivoted, putting her back to the trunk as she kneeled on the floor and removed her contact lenses to their case. The mirror in hand, she closed her eyes and took a steeling breath deep into her lungs.
She could do this.
She had to do this.
She brought the mirror up in front of her face, her eyelids still shuttering her talent. Her heart banged in her chest, so erratic and nervous, so loud in her ears, she half expected Kellan to wake from the sound of it. Her palms were damp, mouth dry as ash.
She had to try.
She had to know.
She lifted her lids and froze at the sight of her face staring back at her in the oval of polished glass. She looked so different without the purple lenses muting the crystalline intensity of her gaze. She hardly recognized herself like this—her features, of course, but lit with an icy fire that seemed ageless, not quite of this world.
Extraordinary, Kellan had said.
Startling, she thought. Unsettling. So unfamiliar, she couldn’t . . .
The thought fell away as the clear pools of her irises began to ripple as she looked at them in the mirror, their surface wobbling as if a small pebble had been dropped into a serene lake.
Transfixed, astonished, she couldn’t look away.
And then, within the fathomless, colorless depths, an image began to take shape. Several images, shadowed figures, a group seated at the front of a large, high-ceilinged room, a tall, raised bench in front of them, separating the group from the smaller figure that stood before them, awaiting their response.
Even before the images began to take clearer shape, Mira recognized the silhouette of the person standing before the court. She felt the person’s trepidation, the bone-deep dread and uncertainty.
She knew, because that person was her.
In the vision, she tried not to tremble as she faced Lucan and the other members of the Global Nations Council seated in judgment on the bench, knowing that they held the power to either save her or destroy her with their decision. Their faces were impassive, without mercy.
She watched in anguished expectation as her vision-self pressed for leniency and got only stoic faces in reply. In the vision, she began to weep, her face dropping into her palms, shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs.
The pain of that image skewered Mira’s heart in real time, made her lips tremble in echoed reaction. She wanted to look away now, before she saw any more. But then all heads in the gallery turned to look behind them as the accused entered the chamber to hear the sentencing.
Kellan.
Oh, God. It was just as he’d said.
He strode forward, broad shoulders squared, head lifted, but she could see resignation in his handsome face as he looked at her. Mira could nearly feel his stoic acceptance as she watched the scene unfold in her reflected gaze.
Her vision-self whirled back around to face the ones who held Kellan’s fate in their hands. She pleaded with them. Tried to draw some of the blame to her instead. To no avail. They announced their edict just as Kellan had told her they would. For the capital crimes Kellan stood accused of . . . death.
As the vision continued, Mira knew her anguish could not possibly be worse.
But she was wrong.
Because then the terrible vision Kellan had prepared her for began to fade into a misty darkness. Another image began to take shape in her reflected gaze. Something dreadful. Something far, far worse than the prospect of Kellan’s execution.
His lifeless body, pale and unmoving, laid out before her.
No . . .