34. Varkhul
THIRTY-FOUR
VARKHUL
The torture intensifies.
The Sovereign doesn’t just tear at the mark—it twists. Tries to turn what Eirene and I built into a weapon. I feel it probing at the magic, looking for cracks it can exploit, ways to use our claiming against us.
This pain has no precedent. It doesn’t strike like a wound or burn like shadow-venom—it reaches into the space where Eirene lives inside me and presses there, trying to corrupt what I feel into something the Sovereign can use.
Such a beautiful thing, this claiming you’ve forged. The entity’s voice has gone thoughtful, contemplative. She feels what you feel. Shares your pain, your pleasure, your guilt. What would happen, I wonder, if I made you feel hatred instead of love?
Cold dread washes through me. “What are you—”
If I can twist your claiming into hatred instead of love…
she would feel it. Feel her beloved executioner turning against her.
Feel the man she saved becoming her enemy.
The Sovereign’s pleasure is obscene. The betrayal alone might break her.
And a broken boundary witch is so much easier to control.
“No.” I thrash against the chains, feel them tighten in response. “No, I won’t let you—”
You don’t have a choice. The claws sink deeper, and I feel the Sovereign’s influence seeping into the mark like venom into a wound. You’re mine now, executioner. Your sins are mine. Your love is mine. And soon, your claiming will serve my purposes instead of hers.
I fight. With everything I have, I fight. Not with my arms—those are useless in the chains.
Not with my blade—the Sovereign had dragged it through with me.
I could see it embedded in the floor below: wrenched from my grip when the shadows pulled me through, then placed there deliberately by something that understood what a blade means to a man who has used one for twenty years.
A reminder. A taunt. I fight with my mind.
My will. The part of me that chose Eirene over the order, that decided to be better, that refuses to let the darkness win.
The Sovereign pushes. I push back. We’re locked in a battle for my soul, and I’m losing—slowly, inevitably, inch by inch.
Then I feel her.
Not just the faint echo I’ve been clinging to—Eirene, fully present, blazing through what remains of our link. She’s close. So close I can almost taste her magic, smell the copper of her blood, feel the determination that drives her forward through the darkness.
She’s freeing them. The souls trapped in the walls, the memories the Sovereign has consumed—she’s giving them back. One by one, she’s tearing the entity’s power away.
I feel the Sovereign’s attention split—part of it still focused on me, on breaking my will and twisting my claiming. But part of it is turning toward her now, recognizing the threat she represents.
Clever girl. The words are a growl, all pretense of control abandoned. She thinks she can unmake me by freeing my prey. She doesn’t understand—she can’t understand—how many I’ve consumed. How much power I’ve built.
“She doesn’t need to understand.” I feel the words rising from some place deep inside me, some well of defiance I didn’t know I had. “She just needs to keep fighting. And so do I.”
I stop trying to protect the mark. Stop fighting to keep what’s left.
Instead, I open myself to Eirene completely. Let her feel everything I’m feeling—the pain, the cold, the guilt, the love. I pour it all into our shared mark, a flood of raw emotion that burns through the Sovereign’s claws like acid.
The entity recoils. Not from the pain—from the love. The genuine, unguarded, overwhelming love I feel for the woman walking through hell to save me.
What—what is this—
“This is what you wanted to twist.” I’m smiling now—a predator’s smile, sharp and certain. “This is what you thought you could turn into a weapon. But love isn’t like guilt, Sovereign. It doesn’t break when you push on it. It gets stronger.”
The Sovereign screams—a sound of pure fury that shakes the walls of stolen memory, that cracks the floor of severed ties, that makes the darkness itself tremble.
And somewhere in the Shadow Court, walking through the nightmare landscape with blood dripping from her hands and determination blazing in her eyes—
Eirene smiles too.
I can sense her response—her fierce, savage joy at hearing the Sovereign’s pain. At knowing that our love is hurting the thing that tried to use it against us.
She’s coming. And when she arrives, we’re going to tear this entity apart—side by side, the way we were meant to fight.
You think you’ve won anything? Its voice has gone cold again—controlled, calculating. You’ve surprised me, executioner. That’s all. But surprises fade. And I have been doing this for centuries.
The claws dig in again. Not at the mark this time—at my memories. At the executions I’ve been reliving since the Sovereign dragged me through the tear.
You want to love her? Fine. Let me show you what that love is worth.
The memories flood back—not playing out before me, but forcing their way into my mind.
Every execution. Every death. Every moment of suppressed doubt and buried conscience.
The Sovereign isn’t just showing them to me anymore.
It’s making me feel them. Making me become the people I killed, experience their fear and confusion and pain in their final moments.
The woman who saved the children—I feel the blade enter her neck, feel the cold shock of steel parting flesh, feel the terrible certainty that her sacrifice was for nothing.
The boy who asked if he did bad—I feel his confusion give way to terror as the blade falls, feel the brief flash of pain before everything goes dark.
The infant—I feel nothing because the infant felt nothing, because it died before it could feel anything, and somehow that’s worse.
I scream. Can’t help it. The pain is absolute, overwhelming, a symphony of suffering that breaks over me in waves.
And in the same instant, carried by the love I just used as a weapon—
Eirene screams with me.
I feel her stagger in the darkness. Feel her fall to her knees as my agony crashes through her mind. The Sovereign has found a new weapon—not our love itself, but the claiming that carries it. Every wave of pain I feel, she feels too. Every death I relive, she relives with me.
Do you understand now? The Sovereign’s voice is triumphant again. Your claiming doesn’t protect you. It doubles the pain. Every moment of suffering I inflict on you reaches her as well. How long do you think she can endure? How long before the woman you love breaks under the burden of your sins?
I try to close the claiming. Try to protect Eirene from what I’m feeling, to bear my punishment alone. But the Sovereign’s claws are tangled too deeply in the magic. Every attempt I make to shield her just opens me wider.
The torture continues. The deaths keep coming. And somewhere in the Shadow Court, the woman I love is screaming my name as my sins tear her apart.
But she doesn’t stop walking.
I feel it through our link—her determination, unbroken despite the agony. She’s still coming. Still fighting. Still believing that I’m worth saving, even as my sins pour through her mind.
I don’t deserve her. I’ve known that since the moment the claiming mark burned itself into my chest. A woman who bleeds to save strangers, bound to a man who’s spent twenty years killing for the order’s convenience. It’s a cruel joke. A cosmic mistake.
But she chose me anyway. And I’ll be damned—literally damned, if this place has its way—before I give the Sovereign the satisfaction of breaking me before she arrives.
That’s my Eirene. My boundary witch. My claimed mate.
She’s coming.
And all I have to do is hold on until she arrives.
The Sovereign sends another wave of memories crashing through me—more deaths, more faces, more guilt. I let them come. Let them wash over me without drowning. Because somewhere in the darkness, a woman with blood on her hands and silver in her hair is fighting her way toward me.
And when she gets here, the Sovereign is going to learn what happens when you threaten the mate of an executioner who has finally found a reason to live.