Tearing through time and space: the Duke who lives on my birthmarks

Chapter 13: Seven Days Back

I was holding a dagger to Cyrus's throat as the moonlight spread a silver spell across the snowy plain. The mechanical pocket watch under his cloak made the sound of gears jamming, the dial glass cracking in a striking resemblance to the pattern of the storm clouds.

“Third flashback.” I licked the ice off my lips as the seven-day countdown burned a seventh scorch mark on the birthmark. Cyrus's shadow blade was stuck in the tundra ten paces away, the blade reflecting our entwined figures - like ancestors fighting in a mural three hundred years ago.

He suddenly took my knife-wielding hand and pressed it to his heart, blue-rose lines bulging under his skin, “Kill me and you'll never find the altar coordinates.” As the blizzard rolled off the tail end, there was a distant roar of shattering ice, the ghost ship of the first householder was crashing through the lake.

I tugged him and rolled into a rocky crevice as a herd of elk raced past overhead, the Papal Atonement Tickets hanging from their antlers. As the fire from the explosion stained the snowy plains, Cyrus suddenly bit his fingertip and smeared blood on the birthmark between my collarbones. Memories from three hundred years ago crashed down like an avalanche-

The first Mrs. Vine was burying the twin pocket watch into the chest cavity of Lorenzo's heir, and the face of that dying teenager completely overlapped with that of Cyrus at this moment.