Chapter 60 #2
My hand covers hers. One breath. Two.
Then I let go. Because this room needs a weapon, not a man in love.
I step forward. Shadows pulling tight around me. Every person in this room—ally and enemy—feels the shift. The temperature doesn’t just drop. It plummets. Frost crackles across the floor in patterns that follow my footsteps.
At least it’s frost again and not snow.
“Here’s what’s going to happen.” My voice carries the way my father’s used to. The way a king’s voice carries. Not with volume, but with authority. The kind that makes people stop breathing to listen. “You are mated. Both of you. Which means killing one kills the other.”
I look at Kestra. She meets my gaze. Understanding already there.
“Which means my sister doesn’t need to choose between claiming a throne and ending the woman who destroyed our family.” I let that settle. “She gets both.”
Amarantha’s composure cracks. The one that shows what’s underneath all the silk and cruelty and carefully maintained beauty.
Terror.
“You can’t.” Her voice has lost every ounce of its music. “Kill him and the Unseelie Court loses its king. The Balance—”
“The Balance broke the day you mated.” Kestra’s voice is ice. Our mother’s voice. “You don’t get to hide behind the thing you destroyed.”
Amarantha moves.
Not toward the door. Toward Moros. Shielding him with her body. Her hands come up and Seelie light blazes from her palms—not the warm gold of a true Seelie queen. Something wrong. Tainted. Light with darkness bleeding through it like veins of rot through marble.
She’s using everything she has left. And she’s aiming at Kestra.
I think the fuck not.
My shadows intercept the blast before it reaches my sister. Darkness swallowing light. The impact shudders through me, my boots sliding back on stone, and I taste copper.
She hits harder than she should and the wrongness of it lands before the impact does.
I know these shadows.
I have been knocked across rooms by these shadows. Punished by them. Taught by them. They have a signature the way a swordsman’s stance has a signature, and Amarantha is wearing my father’s like a coat she stole from his closet.
She’s hitting his children with his magic and he is letting her.
“Kieran!” Ash shouts behind me.
I’m already moving. Shadows erupting from every surface in the room—floor, walls, ceiling, the throne itself.
The shadows don’t just block Amarantha’s next strike. They reach for her. Pin her. Wrap around her wrists and ankles like chains made of night. She screams and the light in her palms detonates, blowing through two of my shadow-chains, but I reform them faster than she can break them.
Kestra joins me. Ice crawling across the floor toward Amarantha’s feet, climbing her legs, reinforcing my shadows with frozen layers. Brother and sister. Shadow and ice. Mab’s children fighting together for the first time in our lives.
Amarantha fights like a cornered animal. Because she is one. Every blast of tainted light, every desperate pull of Moros’s shadow through the bond, every scream—it’s not strategy. It’s survival. A woman who has never loved anything except her own heartbeat fighting to keep it going.
Orion’s fire walls seal the exits. Nobody’s leaving. Tiana circles to the left, patient, blade drawn, waiting for the opening she’s waited years for. Finnian pulls Pepper and the boy behind an overturned table, protecting the ones who can’t protect themselves.
And Ash. Ash stands in the center of it like the eye of a storm.
I press harder. More shadows. Colder. The ice prince earning his name for the first time. Amarantha’s defenses crack, then crack further. Kestra’s ice reaches her chest. My shadows pin her arms.
She’s losing.
She knows she’s losing.
Her eyes go to Moros. Still in the chair. Still drunk. Watching his mate be destroyed by his children with an expression I can’t read and don’t want to.
“Moros.” Amarantha’s voice breaks on his name. The first time I’ve ever heard her beg. “Help me.”
He blinks slowly. The drunk, broken king looking at his true mate pinned in shadow and ice. The woman the bond chose for him. The woman who cost him everything.
He doesn’t move.
Amarantha screams.
And reaches through the bond.
It moves before I see it. My shadows—the ones pinning her—shudder. Something is pulling at them from the inside. Not breaking them. Draining them.
Amarantha is pulling power through the mate bond so hard that Moros convulses in the chair, his body arching as she rips his magic out of him like thread from a spool.
Shadow magic floods into her. Not the scraps that have been bleeding through. Everything. Every shadow in the Unseelie Court answers her call because she’s pulling it through the king himself.
My chains shatter.
Kestra’s ice explodes.
The blast throws me backward into Ash, who catches me, and for one terrible second the room is nothing but white light and dark shadow detonating at the center where Amarantha stands with her mate’s stolen power pouring from her hands.
Moros slumps in the chair. Conscious but barely. She’s taken so much that the shadows around his feet have gone still. Dead. The Unseelie king drained by his own mate bond.
And Amarantha stands in the ruins, wreathed in stolen shadow and dying light, and she is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
She is not stronger. She is full. Carrying more than her body was built for. The shadow leaks out of her in places it shouldn’t—her eyes, her teeth, the seams of her dress. Her hands shake. She doesn’t notice.
The math has gone bad.
Amarantha turns. Not to us.
To Ash.
“You.” The word carries venom of a woman who has watched everyone choose someone else over her. “You took everything from me.”