Page 112 of Sing For Us

Noa.

So I made him the answer; I needed him to be the answer. Because if he wasn’t…what did that make me?

The leader who sent people to war over a lie?

The woman who punished the wrong man?

The daughter who let her father’s killer walk free because she was too blinded by hatred to see what was in front of her?

The woman who is responsible for placing her best friend in the hospital?

The truth is ugly, and I spent years telling myself this was justice, this war I waged on Noa. It was grief and guilt coursing through me simultaneously. In this moment, I realize my need to avenge my father was a desperate need to believe my pain had a purpose.

And the worst part…

The part I hated admitting…

Was that Noa had become my purpose.

I made myself believe that I hated him with all the evidence I had against him. Hatred was easier than emptiness, and anger was easier than grief. And the worst thing of all? Revenge was easier than admitting that I had nothing left.

My parents were gone. The people who knew me before the blood, before the title, and before I gained the reputation of the most ruthless assassin. They taught me how to survive and love. And somewhere between losing them and becoming who I needed to become, I forgot the second lesson.

I became what I believe my parents feared —untouchable. I became the woman who reclused herself from society and wallowed in the dark underbelly of the world. I forgot to let anyone know the girl underneath, the girl who missed her parents like crazy. I still wanted someone to come home to.

And all it took was him—the man standing before me.

The person who made cracks appear in walls I had spent decades building. With him, I remembered things I thought I had killed.

Laughter, trust, and love.

That terrified me because loving him meant admitting I was still capable of needing someone. If I admitted that I needed him, then I could have lost him. And I couldn’t lose anyone. Again.

Losing Noa would have devastated me more than anything in the world.

So, I held on to hatred because that venomous feeling kept me alive and focused on my mission. But what would have become of me after my mission? I would have been an empty vessel. Noa gave me a reason to be alive and a reason to exist. But if he’s truly innocent, then I wouldn’t just lose my revenge.

I would lose the person I had spent years becoming.

I wasn’t afraid of asking him where he was that night. I was afraid of what would happen if I believed him. Because if I believed him, then everything mattered. Every choice I made, every person I assassinated, and every year I spent hunting him.

And I wasn’t ready to discover that the greatest failure of my life wasn’t losing my parents. It was surviving them wrong and proving I forgot to follow their strongest lesson in life—love.

“Look at me.”

There it is. Love.

Chapter forty-three

Noa

The moment she looks up at me, I see the real Lana. Her eyes finally show how she truly feels—lonely. And that’s the most dangerous feeling.

I sit next to her, and we both look out into the open field of my estate.

“I was in Tuzla the night your father got murdered because it was my mother’s anniversary.”

She doesn’t say anything, so I continue talking, laying it all out in the open.