Book 16: I'm Going Back

Lexa

An entire day passes. I count the hours, the minutes, the seconds, until time bleeds together in my head. My mind pounds like a drum, my temples splitting, and the only thing keeping me lucid is a near constant array of healing drafts being poured down my throat every hour on the hour, as if they are responsible for ensuring my heart doesn’t stop beating.

In the first hour of the second day in Silas’s country home in the Highwoods–a mountainous estate several hours north of the capital, I’m told–I rise from bed, gingerly testing my range of motion, feeling how taut and new my spine feels. Like the bones are made of glass.

I make it three steps before my back crumbles, forcing me onto the edge of the bed.

Bea, Silas’s healer, is a stout and bossy woman, a shifter, and a beautiful one, at that. She can’t be olde