Total pages in book: 205
Estimated words: 204377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1022(@200wpm)___ 818(@250wpm)___ 681(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 204377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1022(@200wpm)___ 818(@250wpm)___ 681(@300wpm)
Kody stands on the porch, chin to his chest, arms hanging helplessly at his sides. Alone.
I refuse to accept the look in his tear-soaked eyes. My mind shuts down, rejecting it. My stomach hardens, fighting it.
No body.
River carried him away.
He’s gone.
I try to shut out the words. The visceral pain. Leo’s harrowing howl as he drops to his knees and cries.
Kody and I join him on the ground, our heads bowed together, hands reaching, tangling, clinging.
He’s gone.
I’ll never again look into his bright blue eyes. Never hear his poignant melodies on the saxophone. Never learn his next pet name. Never feel his hair sliding through my fingers.
Never kiss him. Touch him. Smell him. Hold him.
He has a father out there somewhere who will never know how special he is, will never know how tragically he died.
I’ll never get to show him the world.
Never.
The opposite of forever.
I’m numb. Shook to my beaten soul. Too gutted to form words of comfort.
His brothers. His sobbing, inconsolable brothers. Their pain bulldozes mine, their wreckage annihilating. All-consuming. Bottomless.
Trapped in the dark, we remain there, huddled together in grief, kneeling on the brink of our own looming deaths.
At some point, my thoughts stir, latching onto the danger creeping in.
Frostbite.
Hypothermia.
“Need to go inside.” I try to find my footing, battling stiff joints, unable to stand. “I don’t know how—” My voice breaks. “How to keep going.”
“Tonight, we mourn our brother.” Kody helps me up, his gaunt cheeks wet with tears. “Tomorrow, we find the answers we need to survive.”
“In a cage of ice and echoes.” Leo clutches my other side, his bloodshot eyes on the distant landscape.
Across the snowy tundra, beyond the hills of shivers and shadows, the horizon begins to glow.
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