Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

"I remember the day you asked me to be your wife. I love you, Richard. Remember our wedding? Remember the spirit house?"

She was also trying to distract him, to keep him from thinking about what was happening. Instead, it only reminded him of Shota's warning that if he married her she would conceive a monster.

"Touching," the soldier behind him said. "It's the passionate ones like her who are good in the sack, don't you think?"

Richard wanted to rip the man's head off, but he said nothing. The man wanted him to say something, to beg, to protest, to wail in agony. As a last act of defiance against such men, Richard denied him the satisfaction.

Kahlan cried out her love, and that she wanted him to remember the first time she had kissed him.

Despite everything, that made him smile.

At the moment, she didn't care what was going to happen to her, she just wanted to distract him, to ease the pain and terror of his last moments of life.

His last moments.

It was all ending. It was all over. There was no more.

Life was over. His time with the woman he loved was over. There would be no more.

The world was ending.

"Richard! Richard! I love you so much! Look at me, Richard! I love you! Look at me! That's right, look at me! You're the only one I ever loved! Only you, Richard! Only you! That's all that matters — that I love you. Do you love me? Tell me, please, Richard. Tell me. Tell me now."

He felt the blade catch on the thin veneer of flesh covering his throat.

"I love you, Kahlan. You alone. Always."

"Touching," the soldier growled in his ear as he held the blade against Richard's throat. "While you're down in the pit, bleeding out, I'll have my hands all over her. I'm going to rape your pretty little wife. You'll be dead by then, but before you die, I want you to know exactly what I'm going to do to her, and that there's nothing you can do to stop it, because it's the Creator's will being done.

"You should have long ago bowed to the ways of the Order, but instead you've fought to keep to your sinful ways, your selfish ways, and turned away from everything right and just. For your crimes against your fellow man you will not only die, but you will suffer for all eternity at the hands of the Keeper of the underworld. Suffer greatly.

"As you go to the dark afterlife, I want you to go there knowing that if your precious Kahlan lives, it will only be as a whore for us. If she lives long enough, and she has a boy child, he will grow up to be a great soldier of the Order, and to hate your kind. We'll see to it that he comes here someday to spit on your grave, to spit on you and those like you who would have raised him in your wicked ways, raised him to turn away from serving his fellow man and the Creator.

"You think on that as your spirit is being sucked down into darkness. As your body grows cold, I'll be with the nice warm body of your love, giving it to her good. I want to make sure you know that before you die."

Richard was already dead inside. It was over, life and the world were ended. So much lost. Everything lost. For nothing but a mindless hatred of every value, of life itself, by those who chose instead to embrace the emptiness of death.

"I love you now and always, with all my heart," he said in a hoarse voice. "You've made my life a joy."

He saw Kahlan nodding that she'd heard him, and her lips mouthing her love for him.

She was so beautiful.

More than anything, he hated to see her inconsolable grief.

They stared into one another's eyes, frozen in that instant that would be the last instant that the world existed.

Richard gasped in a cry of terror, anguish, and sudden sharp pain as he felt the blade bite flesh, felt it slice mortally deep into his throat.

It was the end of everything.

CHAPTER 18

"Stop it," Nicci growled.

Richard blinked. His mind reeled in confusion. Nicci had Shota's wrist in an iron grip, holding her hand away from him. But Shota still had an arm around his waist.

"I don't know what you're doing," Nicci said in a tone so dangerous he thought that surely Shota would shrink back in fear, "but you will stop it."

Shota did not shrink back, nor did she look the least bit fearful. "I am doing what needs to be done."

Nicci was having none of it. "Back away from him, or I will kill you where you stand."

Cara, Agiel in hand and looking even more displeased than Nicci, stood close on the other side of the witch woman, blocking her in. Before Shota could return the threat in kind, Richard collapsed heavily to the marble bench surrounding the fountain.

He was panting, gasping, and in a state of ragged terror. In his mind's eye he could still see Kahlan in the hands of those thugs, still feel the sharp blade slicing deep into him. His fingers lightly brushed across his throat, but there was no gaping wound, no blood. He desperately didn't want to let go of the sight of Kahlan, but at the same time it was so horrifying a glimpse of her hopeless dread that he wanted nothing so much as to forever wipe it from his mind.