Chapter 22 His Eurydice
His Eurydice
Cora
The stone was cold.
That was the first thing I could feel, a single, simple truth in a world that had just become impossible.
I knelt where Damon had been consumed, my palms pressed flat against the polished marble of the amphitheater floor.
It was just stone. There was no lingering warmth, no phantom vibration, no proof that a man, that a part of my own soul, had been unmade here only moments ago.
Around me, the world was a distant, muffled roar.
Shouts. The sound of running feet. The low groans of the wounded.
The air, heavy with the acrid smell of scorched magic, should have been suffocating.
But my lungs felt hollow, as if they had forgotten how to draw a proper breath.
I was underwater, wrapped in a thick blanket of pure, absolute shock.
A gaping wound pulsed where our bond had lived. It was a numb, silent space, a place so barren and so empty my own nerve endings couldn’t even register the pain of it. My heart beat against my ribs, a frantic, stupid muscle that didn’t seem to understand that it was beating for nothing.
My gaze was fixed on a hairline crack in the marble, a dark, jagged line spidering out from where I knelt.
I traced it with my finger, my mind clinging to the simple, physical reality of it.
The floor is broken. It was a fact. Something I could touch.
Unlike what had just happened, which my mind refused to hold.
He was here. And now he was not. The two thoughts could not exist in the same space.
Shapes moved in my peripheral vision. Julian being helped away by other robed figures, his badly burned hands still smoking.
The Artemis guard, smiling slightly, still clutching her silver bow in triumph.
Marcus Dred, bruised, breaking free of the cracking black ice.
They were just ghosts, echoes from a world that had ended moments ago. I saw them, but they didn’t feel real.
My fingers curled on the stone, a tremor starting in my hand. It was a small thing, a tiny fissure in the dam of my denial. The chill seeped into my skin. It was the cold of a place where a life had just been extinguished. The cold of a void. And deep inside me, something was beginning to scream.
The scream remained trapped in the underwater world of my mind. My body was a statue of grief, locked in place. But the tremor that had started in my fingers was spreading, a shudder working its way up my arms.
It was a particular sound that finally broke me.
Not the shouts of the guards or the groans of the wounded, but a sharp, punishing click of heels on marble, approaching from behind.
It was the sound of a world that was moving on, a world that was not ending.
The sheer, infuriating normality of it was a violation.
“Cora, sweetheart,” Helena murmured, her voice thick with a maternal concern.
Her hands fluttered toward my shoulders, her scent of expensive florals a cloying, sickening perfume in the choking air.
“You’re in shock. You’re not thinking clearly.
We need to get you away from here, somewhere safe where you can rest.”
Her touch wasn’t a comfort. It was a jolt of pure, white-hot agony, as if her skin were coated in acid. I snapped. The muffled roar of the world came rushing in, and the scream in my chest finally found a voice.
“Safe?” The word tasted like bile. I recoiled from her, stumbling to my feet. The ground tilted beneath me, but my rage was a better anchor than the stone had ever been. “You want to lecture me about safety?”
Helena pressed her lips together so tightly they went white. “I was trying to protect—”
“Don’t.” My gaze snapped from her face to the line of Artemis warriors.
My fury, now unleashed, found its first and truest target.
I saw the archer, her silver eyes watching me, unwavering.
The woman who had fired the shot. “You killed him!” I screamed, the sound raw and torn, echoing off the ancient stone. “You stood there, and you killed him!”
The archer’s expression didn’t soften. “We saw a monster that needed to be put down.”
“He was not a monster!” I took a step toward her, a blind, useless lunge.
Julian moved to intercept me, holding his burned hands up in a placating gesture. “Dr. Ellis, what my sister says is true. What we saw… it was an abomination. An act of necessity.”
“Necessity?” I turned on him, my rage burning even brighter, fueled by his calm justification. “You let her kill him!”
“She saved your life.”
Alexander was pushing himself to his feet from near the amphitheater wall, where Damon’s power had thrown him. His golden hair was dusted with stone, and a long, dark tear ran through the shoulder of his expensive suit.
He moved to stand beside Helena, a portrait of controlled chaos, his face a mask of practiced, reasonable empathy. It was a masterful performance. The proprietary victor from the platform was gone, replaced by the concerned politician. The lie was so good it made my stomach turn.
“She’s right, Cora,” he said, his tone soft, pitched to persuade the onlookers. “Listen to her. We all saw what that bond was doing to you. It was a parasite, draining your life force to sustain itself. It was killing you.”
The audacity of it stole the breath from my lungs. He stood there, the architect of my ruin, and dared to reframe my mutilation as a mercy. They don’t see a murder. They see a medical procedure. And he is the lead surgeon, explaining the necessity of the amputation to the grieving family.
“Killing me?” A laugh tore from my throat, sharp enough to draw blood.
He pressed forward, his Alpha presence rolling off him in waves. “Helena made a choice no one else was brave enough to make. She chose to save you. The threat is gone. You are safe. That is what matters.”
Something inside me snapped.
I didn’t think. I didn’t calculate. It was a surge of blind, primal rage against the soul-crushing logic of his public lie.
I lashed out with every ounce of strength the severed bond had left me.
I slammed into Alexander, a desperate, furious shove that carried the weight of my entire shattered world.
“Don’t you touch me!” I screamed. “You destroyed him! You destroyed everything!”
Alexander didn’t even flinch, his body a solid, unyielding wall of muscle and infuriating calm.
He simply looked down at my hands, still pressed against his chest, and then back up at my face.
There was no anger in his eyes. Only a look of profound, calculated pity that was more insulting than any blow could ever be.
“We destroyed an illusion,” he said, his voice a low, reasonable murmur meant for me, but loud enough for Julian and the others to hear.
“The people of House Hades are corrupted by nature. Blackwood was a creature of the void long before I came along. You only survived him at all because of Helena.”
It was a masterpiece of misdirection, a twisting of the truth so skillful it almost made me doubt my own memory. He was reframing Damon’s internal battle not as a noble fight, but as the last twitches of a monster that was already dead. He was erasing the man and leaving only the abomination.
“You’re a liar,” I choked out. "And you disgust me."
“He would have let you wither and die, Cora,” Helena said, stepping forward, her voice trembling with what sounded like genuine, maternal conviction.
“That bond was not a prize. It was a death sentence. A direct conduit to the void that was drinking your life away. I saw the future of it, a slow, withering death. He was an anchor dragging you into the abyss, and I chose to cut the rope.”
She reached for me again, not to touch, but in a gesture of pleading. She was not just playing a role. She had convinced herself that her betrayal was a heroic sacrifice. The absolute certainty of her righteousness was a wall I could never hope to breach with mere anger.
“I chose you,” she whispered, her voice cracking with emotion. “I chose your life, your mind, your future, over the monster you were bound to.”
Her gaze swept from me to Julian, then back, ensuring everyone in this broken arena saw the tears welling in her eyes. “What I did was a brutal, terrible choice. But I would do it again to save you.”
Her words hung in the air, a perfect, unassailable fortress of righteous justification. She had saved me. She had chosen me. How could I possibly rage against an act of such profound, selfless mercy? The logic was a cage, and its bars were closing in around me.
The others all listened to her and understood what Helena had done, and what had actually caused Damon’s rampage. I saw realization dawn on Julian’s face, and the Artemis guards fidget slightly in discomfort.
But House Hera was the ultimate authority on bonds. If Helena said this had been necessary, for all of them, it was the absolute truth.
I looked at her tear-streaked face, at the genuine, heartfelt belief in her own heroism. And I felt the wildfire in my chest sputter and die, extinguished not by reason, but by a new kind of horror, fiercer and sharper than the rage had been.
It was the horror of being utterly, completely misunderstood.
They hadn’t just murdered a part of my soul.
They were now calmly and reasonably explaining to me why it had been for my own good.
The clinical, detached mercy of it was a greater violation than any act of malice could ever be.
They hadn’t seen a man and a woman, bound in a fragile, terrifying, and beautiful new reality.
They had seen a problem. A corrupted asset and a valuable resource.
They had made a pragmatic calculation and decided which piece was worth sacrificing.
The most profound experience of my life had been reduced to an equation on their political ledger.