Undeniably Chosen

by Shelly Crane

  “No!” we wailed, knowing this was it, that had been our final shot.

  “Vivere, Ashlyn. Remember. Live!” he called, his arms reaching through the bars, just for the sake of reaching. His head rested on the bars, too, to try to see me for as long as he could before I was gone. “Vivere!”

  “Oh, my God…” I heard Seth in my ear.

  “Amor in aeternum!” Ashlyn and I yelled together, my voice croaking. “I love you,” we sobbed as best as we could as we turned the corner, the guard snatching her around carelessly and burning an offense mark on Ashlyn’s forearm.

  “I love you, Ashlyn!” we heard him yell down the passageway. It didn’t echo. It was a solid message, meant to rip through the ripples of time like tissue paper. “I’ll find you again.”

  Just like that we were back on the rooftop. It was such a harsh transition, that I almost fell and had to hold my hands out. But then I saw what this vision was and I wished we had stayed in the dungeon. Richard was on his knees on the bricks, no shirt on. He was still so thin and his beard and hair were scraggily. He had three men around him and this didn’t look like a tea party.

  This looked like an execution.

  “Oh, Richard,” the same man said, swiping his fingers over chin. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

  And that’s when I knew. This was an execution.

  “Oh, no,” I mumbled.

  “You’re right,” Richard said. But I looked over at Seth…because he had said it, too. I watched as Seth’s mouth moved as Richard continued. “It didn’t have to be this way. You’re choosing this.”

  The man smiled. “You’re right. I am. And as soon as you’re gone, she’ll finally stop acting like a stupid child and get back to her duties.”

  “And what’s that? Watson family lapdog, Sid?”

  Sid…

  Sid nodded to the one behind him and he put his hands on either side of Richard’s head. It wasn’t until Seth hissed that I understood what I was too dense to see before.

  “No,” I said and shook my head as I took Seth’s face in my hands, pulling his face to look at me. His eyes had dulled, and when he looked at me it was like he wasn’t seeing me. It was like he was seeing another place. “No. Please.”

  He started to buckle and I struggled to catch him, finally seeing everything around me. Daddy ran to help me, but Seth fell to his knees. I looked at him helplessly. And then shifted my gaze to Richard to see what was coming next.

  The man’s hands shook a little beside Richard’s head. Richard started to fight, so the other two grabbed his arms and held him down on his knees. I moved back a little, waiting for Seth to start swinging, but he didn’t. I cupped his face again.

  “Seth, don’t get lost,” I whispered, telling him the same thing he’d told me. “I’m right here. I’ve got you. I’m not letting go. You go, I go.”

  He gasped. “You think you can do this to her?” I turned to look at Richard. He shook his head angrily, even as they held him down, sweat pouring from his brow and chin. “She’ll end you. She will take care of her people, one way or another. If you think you’re going to just get away with this, you really are the most daft, mad man on the planet. She loves me, yes, but she loves her people, too. She’s the Visionary, you fool! By getting rid of me, you’re solving nothing! She still loves her people.” I swung my gaze to Seth and watched his lips—the beautiful words coming from his lips. Even in that moment, as they were about to kill him, he was still fighting for her. My heart could have burst in that moment. “You think you’ve broken her.”

  “I have.” Sid smirked. “Just like a mare that needs to be broken before she’s saddled.”

  Seth gulped. I was sure that Richard had as well. “You can try to break her, but she’ll just be stronger when she comes out on the other side. You’re forging her with fire. People who have been broken are fearsome because they know how to stay alive.”

  The man’s hands shook harder and Richard’s head began to shake with it at a small, rapid pace that was barely noticeable. He groaned and Seth groaned with him. Richard’s nose began to bleed.

  “You plead for someone that can’t even hear you,” Sid said and laughed once, looking down on him as if he pitied him.

  “She doesn’t need to hear me. I’m not pleading for her. I’m making sure you know that she’ll get the last word.

  Sid smiled, showing no teeth. “Funny thing about last words—often times you hear them at your back.” He nodded once the man. “Goodbye, Richard. Don’t worry about our girl,” Richard began to struggle against the two men again, but his thin, hungry body was no match, “I’ll be taking very good care of her. Finish him.” Sid turned to go without another glance.

  Watching Richard fight against them as the man used his ability and smiled—actually smiled—made me ache in my chest, my imprint actually hurt, as if Richard belonged to me. Blood ran more from his nose, and then from his ear. I gasped and turn to check Seth. He wasn’t bleeding, but he was shaking. I wrapped my arms around his head, pressing his head to my chest and whispered that I had him, that he was mine, that he wasn’t going anywhere, that if he left, I was going, too.

  And since I was watching Richard die in front of my eyes, I was really starting to worry that it might be a possibility.

  A loud bang behind us had us all turning to see. A distraught, disheveled Ashlyn came busting through the door. She was barefoot in a long pale pink nightgown with long sleeves that had been torn and clawed at, it seemed. She was dirty, too. Her hair piled on top of her head in a bun that was falling loose.

  “Ashlyn,” Richard sighed and coughed, choking on his blood. “Get the hell away from here,” he and Seth growled in a voice I’d never heard.

  Richard was scared for her, yes, but more than that he didn’t want her to watch him die. And that was exactly what was about to happen.

  “Oh, God, help me,” she whispered as she stopped walking and looked at him.

  “Visionary,” Sid groaned as he grabbed her upper clothed-arm and swung her around. “Since you are so determined to evade my rules and guards I had placed for you, then you can watch as the blood vessels in your precious Richard’s head are expanded until they burst.”

  “No!” she screamed.

  “I tried to protect you from this,” he said and gave her a look. What a bastard. Trying to act as if he cared while he killed her significant. “I tried to shield you from this. That’s why I placed the guard at the library with you, but you just don’t ever listen to me.” Richard groaned as the man kept working on him. “You have to start trusting me. If you had, you wouldn’t be watching this right now.” He nodded his head to the man. “Finish it.”

  When the groaning and gurgling from Richard, and the screaming from Ashlyn started, I hugged Seth to my chest and looked away completely. I couldn’t watch a man die. I just couldn’t.

  “Vivere, Ashlyn. Amor in aeternum,” he and Seth groaned. I looked at Seth’s face as he said the explanation, needing to say the final words that Sid didn’t understand—they weren’t for him. “Live. Forever, my love.”

  Seth’s eyes didn’t see me and I knew that he was in that state of dream and memory just like I had been. But what an awful memory to be trapped in. When I heard Ashlyn gasp, I made myself look away from him to see Richard’s chest buckled out wide and his arms flung out. I looked back at Seth to make sure he wasn’t following suit, but he seemed to be let go at that point.

  I sighed harshly, accepting his hug, pressing our foreheads together for just a few seconds, but then I had to see. I had to be there for Ashlyn and see this thing through. Ashlyn had closed her eyes. They let his body fall to the brick under our feet carelessly, like he didn’t matter at all, like he wasn’t a person, like they hadn’t just murdered someone’s significant and then they were going to go inside and have dinner with theirs.

  Sid let her go. That surprised me. I watched as she ran with all she had to him and knelt down. She finally got to touch him, but
it all was all too late. She was sobbing so loud, her mouth wide, not wiping her tears. She landed on her knees hard. The first thing her hand touched was his cheek that was smeared with his blood from his nose, but she didn’t even seem to notice the blood—all she saw was him.

  “Richard,” she whispered, like she was coaxing him awake, “I’m here now. I was just a little bit late.” She sobbed again, her chest wracking so hard she could barely catch her breath. “I’m so sorry! I tried to get out. I tried to get you, but I was too late. I’ll never forgive myself for that. I’m so sorry. I ruined everything. I didn’t touch you that day on the rooftop. I was scared. I was too scared. I was a fool!” she wailed and leaned down, putting her head on his chest. “Richard, please. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me here.”

  I felt my chest shaking as I watched it. I’d never been so heartbroken watching something. I felt Seth touch my chin. He seemed pale, but focused.

  “Don’t watch,” he said softly and I fought him to look again.

  “I have to.”

  “No, baby,” he whispered in my ear, hugging my head to his chest. “I wouldn’t want you to watch if that was me on the ground.”

  I winced, squeezing my eyes shut. Neither would I. I’d beg him to leave. To run. I let him take me away from that scene, to look at him instead, right in his ocean blue eyes. Oh, God, I prayed that this night would end.

  “Enough,” Sid said calmly. We both looked over to see him giving her a sympathetic look that would rival any funeral-goer. “I’m sorry about this. I let you say your goodbye. Now we have work to do. It’s time to get back to—”

  “You know you’re going to rot for this, right?”

  He stopped and cocked his head. “Excuse me?”

  She leaned in, kissing Richard’s forehead, getting some of his blood on her jaw in the process. She looked at him once more, smoothing back his hair as she stood on her shaky legs. This was the only time she’d ever gotten to touch him. She stood, her eyes red, her hair wild, her nightgown torn, barefoot, and blood now on her face. She looked like a wild, scorned thing and now, thanks to him, she was one.

  “I said, you’re going to rot in Hell. You’ll pay for this, one way or another. All of you will pay for what you’ve done. And the ones who knew and just stood by and did…nothing.”

  Sid smirked. “Oh, Visionary. You’re here to transcribe scrolls and motivate our people…to do what I say. If only you had that kind of power.”

  The vision faded and we were left in the dream—my dream—with my parents standing there with Ashlyn. I let out a whoosh of a breath and tried to catch a steady lungful, but couldn’t get a good handle on it with the small sob still chasing the breaths in my chest.

  “Aw, Ava,” Ashlyn soothed, “it truly warms my heart that you would care so much.”

  “Don’t speak to her, Ashlyn,” Seth defended and hugged me harder, shielding me from her. “What you just did was—”

  “I showed you what you needed to see.”

  “You blindsided us. There were a thousand ways to tell us…that other than showing us that way,” he growled in that voice that I realized was a lot like Richard’s when he was angry, too. I squeezed my eyes shut tight against Seth’s shirt.

  “You needed to see.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “You did! She did.”

  “Now you’re really losing me. I think she needed to see least of all,” Seth said back, but his bite was gone. I looked up at him, at his face. He looked at Ashlyn and I knew—he couldn’t be angry with her just like I couldn’t be angry with Richard if he was here. He’d just been in Richard’s body, spouting his love for her as he died for her.

  Another spike of gut-wrenching agony slashed across my chest. A noise emerged from my throat and I turned to look at Ashlyn.

  “Please, no more games. Just tell us why. Why did you make us watch, and,” I gulped, “what connection exactly…do Seth and I have to you and Richard?”

  I waited and prayed, begged, with everything in me that she wasn’t going to say that we were them, that they were us, that we were reincarnated or re-embodiments of them. I just wanted to be myself. I wanted to love Seth and I wanted for my heart and soul to be my own. I didn’t want her to say that he only loved me because Richard had loved her and he was just chasing her soul through me.

  She looked at my face and for the first time I saw remorse.

  “No! That can’t be true.” I looked at Seth and back at her. “I don’t love him just because you love Richard.” I felt the tears coming down my face and let them come. I let them fall heavy and loud to the ground like stomps of rebellion. “I love him because he’s mine, because he was promised to me, because he’s a good person regardless of his environment, because he wanted me even when I didn’t want him,” I sniffed, remembering, “because he has amazing taste in music, because he looks just as good in his fireman suit as he does barefoot in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, because he can draw me a picture that takes my breath away, because even when we touches me in the dream where I can’t feel his calm or tingles, I still get tingles because it’s him, because he took the time to find out all my favorite things, and because he came to my dreams to find me when I couldn’t be found sitting right next to him.”

  Seth’s mouth was open as he looked at me. He didn’t look at her at all. “Is that really how you see me?”

  “Oh, my gosh, yes,” I mumbled and leaned up, wrapping my hands around the back of his neck. I brought my mouth right up to the place before you kiss someone. “If I never kissed you again, if I never got to feel your calm again, if I never got to wake up with you and look at your eyes and know that I had spent a night with you in my dreams, even if I didn’t remember it,” I laughed, but it was really a half sob, half cry. “Seth, you have to know that you have made me feel so loved.”

  He put his big hands on my hips and tugged me to him, not leaving any room between us. “Stop,” he hissed against my temple. “You’re killing me.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not killing me,” he said softly and leaned down to kiss my lips, pressing there for a long time, not wanting to leave or just unable to. When he finally pulled away, I knew what was coming. He started to speak. “You have to know that I feel the same.” He tilted his head and swallowed, smoothing my cheek with his thumb and licking his lip. “Ava, sometimes when you fall asleep, I watch you. I run my fingers across your cheek and down your nose and just…wonder how the hell you’re mine.” His hand on my hip gripped me almost painfully to him, bunching in my shirt and twisting, as he gained steam and began to speak quickly. “You have to know that I would do anything for you. And that if we never got to touch again after today, that I would die happy—”

  I put my fingers on his lips, ending his speech in its tracks. He sighed against my fingers. “Seth, you have proven over and over again that you love me. I was the one that needed to make sure you knew.” He shook his head a ‘no’ but I kept going. “For all the reasons I said, you make sure I know, now I hope you know. But I have a lot of catching up to do.” I let my arms circle his neck and went on my tiptoes, loving how his arms automatically wound themselves around me in response, lifting my feet from the ground and bringing my face to his. He looked so sexy, heavy lidded and ready to do anything in the world I would ask of him, burn down bridges and take down mountains if that’s what I needed. I spoke softly against the corner of his mouth. “Thank you for fighting for me, from the very beginning, and making sure I knew that you wanted me—my last name be damned.”

  He sighed and kissed me before setting me to my feet, but kept me against him with a big, warm hand against my back. It’s funny what just a hand and nothing else on you can do to give you chills and goosebumps. He turned back to Ashlyn as if he had known this whole time that she was waiting for us. I on the other hand flushed pink at remembering we had an audience.

  She smiled at my blushing, a little deviously I th
ought and then it changed to something more soft as she looked away and said, “No, you aren’t Richard and I reincarnated, re-embodied, or anything of the like.” She looked back at us. I must have looked shocked. “Surprised?”

  “Yes, actually. Especially since it seemed as if you were leading us that way.” I knew I had some bite in my voice. Ashlyn seemed to like to play games sometimes and I got it. She never got to see anyone in the palace except us when we were kids and my Mom because she was the previous Visionary. I might go a little bonkers and get a mean streak, too. That was a lot of years of walking though brick walls and talking to myself. Seth squeezed my hand and I sighed a little twisting my lips.

  She smiled again, seeming to enjoy our back and forth. “Gosh, you two…even as kids you two were so dynamic together. Coming and seeing you was my absolute favorite thing to do. You fought in the cutest ways and were so protective of each other.”

  “Did you know back then?” Mom asked and there was no question she expected to be answered. “When you told me that Seth would come back into our lives, did you know that he would be her significant.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why not just tell me th—”

  “You wouldn’t have let him be, you wouldn’t have let him go, you wouldn’t have let things take their course if you knew. And things had to happen the way they did. I already told you.”

  Seth cut in, “If we’re not you and Richard then how do you explain everything? Us being drawn here, to this spot, in the way we were?”

  “This was where we met and where Richard died. Of course you would come back here.”

  Seth huffed. “You understand you just contradicted yourself, right?”

  She squinted. “What do you mean?”

  He looked down, trying to calm himself for a second before looking back up at her. “Ava with the birds and liking old music. And me with my drawings.”

  “Oh, that,” she replied nonchalantly. I rolled my eyes. “It’s just an imprint.”