"Can you see the beauty in this moment, buried under the pain?"
Jocelynn wanted very badly to say yes, to say that she could see what Nyrielle saw when she looked at her sister on the brink of death. But the truth was that she couldn't. She could see the defiance and the determination… It resembled in some ways the look her own eyes had come to hold in recent days.
But the closest Jocelynn could come to seeing Ashlynn's determination to live was the absence of the shadow that had come to haunt her own eyes in the days since Eleanor's death. The Ashlynn in the painting still clung to things that Jocelynn had already lost.
Perhaps the Ashlynn of that night had simply been naive. She'd suffered a great tragedy and a greater betrayal, but she hadn't yet been helpless. She hadn't watched their cousin die, sacrificing herself so she could live. She hadn't taken up a blade to claim a life, whether someone else had guided her hands or not.
