Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(98)
Author: Nalini Singh

Everything you need to settle our estates is in there. I know we’re leaving you alone, but I’ve made sure you’ll be able to afford every resource you could ever need.

Tanu says she’s dreamed a dazzling future for you, and I want to believe her, but if fate isn’t so kind, then you’ll have the money to fight it. I couldn’t find the answer, but another surgeon might.

Make sure Tanu’s brain is autopsied; compare it to the results of Mom’s autopsy—I had it done privately after the accident. The report is in the safe-deposit box, along with full scans of her brain. The associated slides are in a special medical storage facility you’ll find the details of in the box. Make sure the pathologist follows the format exactly so you get all the required information. If he balks once he has cause of death, hire a private pathologist to redo that part.

You’ve lived without fear for so long. Keep on doing it, keep on being the strongest of us all.

With all my love—Arvi

The grief slammed into her anew and with it a beam of blinding knowledge. “Don’t go with me, Janvier.” She sat up, held the beautiful moss green eyes that had laughed with her across the world. “Don’t make that choice when it happens for me.”

Arms locked around her, Janvier shook his head, his jaw set in a way she’d seen only rarely. She’d lost the argument every single time. “No,” he said, “that you cannot ask of me.”

“Yes, I can.” She gripped his jacket on either side, tried to shake him. “Think of Arvi—he saved so many lives.” Angry tears formed. Blinking them away, she said, “Those gifted hands will never again pick up a scalpel, never again give someone hope.”

“He lived a shadow life,” Janvier growled. “You said it yourself. It was his choice to go today, when he was happier than he’d been for decades!”

“Arvi has been heading toward this since the day Tanu was first diagnosed! You’re whole, healthy.”

“I won’t be after you!” His fury filled the car, his voice raw. “I won’t be me after you.”

“Honor came back for Dmitri,” Ashwini whispered, sharing a secret she’d spoken to no other. “I promise you I’ll come back for you.” She might not wear the same face, the same name, but she’d know him. Always, she’d know him. “No matter what it takes. I’ll come back.”

His eyes glittering wet, Janvier’s fingers dug into her hips. “You’re sentencing me to an eon alone. How can you ask that?”

“Because you’re strong enough to bear the pain.”

“No, I’m not.”

She kissed him, her hand curved around his neck. “You need to be. I need to know you’ll be here when I return.”

He wouldn’t look at her, his muscles rigid, and she knew she’d lost the battle today. But it wasn’t over. The disease inside her might snuff out her light, but she would not let it snuff out Janvier’s.

•   •   •

Fourteen days later and a week after Felicity and Lilli were laid to rest, Janvier drove his Ashblade high into the mountains, where she scattered the ashes of her sister and her brother on the wind. According to the autopsies, Tanushree and Arvan Taj had died of heart failure. Inexplicable, said the pathologist, but not unheard-of in twins. Whatever it was that connected them, it sometimes snipped both lives short when only one was wounded.

Two syringes had been found in Arvan Taj’s pocket, filled with a drug that would’ve stopped their hearts if the needle was stabbed into the organ, the plunger pushed down. Neither syringe had been uncapped, much less used. The siblings bore no marks on their bodies.

It was as if once they’d made the decision to go, their hearts had simply stopped beating. They’d been found at peace on the wrought-iron seat where Ashwini and Janvier had last seen them, Arvan’s arm around Tanu’s shoulders and her head against his chest, their eyes closed and the sunrise warm on their faces.

The pathologist had done the specialist autopsy requested on Tanu’s brain, but the results had appeared ordinary at first glance. However, when Ash took that report and its associated findings, as well as her mother’s, to a neurosurgeon who had been a friend of Arvan’s, the doctor had discovered an abnormality deep in the temporal lobe. A tiny, tiny malformation that was identical in mother and daughter, except that Tanu’s was slightly larger.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” the doctor had said. “No one could’ve ever picked it up without having the two slides side by side.” His brow had furrowed. “I don’t think it had anything to do with her death,” he’d told Ash, unaware of the Taj history on the female side. “But even if it was malignant, there would’ve been nothing we could do. It’s in an inoperable location and I don’t know of any drug created to deal with something like this.”

Ash had taken the news better than Janvier. It was Ash who’d held him, who had comforted him. His strong, beautiful lover.

“There,” she whispered now, putting down the second urn. “I felt them go. I think they were waiting to make sure I was all right.” The long white cotton scarf she wore around her neck, the same color as her tunic and leggings, threw the sorrow on her face into sharp relief, the wind blowing back the rich silk of her hair.

Sliding his arm around her, he stood with her on the mountaintop and he thought of the promise she’d asked him to make. “If you’re right and people sometimes come back, then I’ll come back with you.” He couldn’t imagine it any other way. His soul would find hers, no matter the unknown beyond death.

“You are an awful, mule-stubborn man.”

“I love you, too.”

A quiet, husky laugh as she tilted up her head. “I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t let this thing in my head take you, too.”

“I’m over two hundred years old,” he reminded her. “By rights, I should already be dust in the earth. Eternal life for its own sake has no meaning for me—I’m angry only because I won’t get to live it with you.”

Reaching up to stroke her fingers through his hair, she sighed. “Let’s have hope in Tanu’s dream and discuss your stubbornness another time.” A hard pull of his hair that made him wince. “When I have a kukri at your throat.”

He nipped her lower lip, smiled. “Full throttle all the way, cher.”