Chapter 132

Lusia The masked words floated in the air they felt like drops of poison going in and deep into my chest and spreading slowly and surely like venom through my bloodstream. Kiara was having Dane's child. The thud seemed to echo--cold and leaden--in my heart, and I felt it--like a sharp finality of a door shutting hard. Everything in me scrambled madly to piece together what I had just heard. My already tilted world tilted even further. I blinked once, twice, rapidly, and desperately, as if it were a possible cure to blinding those words off me as if the very act of vision could ever be altered in its most persecuting form to erase the very embittering truth. I gasped; my lips somehow managed to part, jagged laughter bubbling thinly, slicing right through before I could make sense of it. "No way," I stuttered, feeling the very cold disbelief creeping down my arms and legs like frostbite. My eyes were kept on the sight before me: the naked woman squatting in the moonlit clearing, tremblin