Chapter 16
If this was the end—if the gods themselves had finally decided he’d given enough blood, enough bone, enough soul—then let his last breath be filled with the taste of her.
Consciousness returned to Ivan like a blade between his ribs. He dragged in a breath, and his body answered with violence. His chest ground and splintered. Muscles seized and screamed. His wrists burned where the chains bit deep, skin split, holding him upright like a carcass strung for curing.
Ivan clenched his jaw and swallowed the pain.
He would not give it sound.
“Still awake?”
The man’s tone held irritation more than cruelty. A fist followed the question. It landed hard against Ivan’s cheek and sent him swaying against the chains, the links rattling like loose bones.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “You’re harder to kill than you look.”
Ivan’s mouth twitched, tasting copper.
Harder to kill.
That was the curse of it. He had taken too much to be granted something so merciful as an easy death. He laughed, and the man flicked open the curved knife at his hip and drove it into Ivan’s side, parting skin along an old scar that healers had stitched and re-stitched.
Pain bloomed, white and blinding. But it was almost intimate in its familiarity.
He bowed forward against the bite of it, breath shuddering, and waited for the dark to rush in and claim him.
It did not. Death was a coward. Or, worse—a god with a cruel appetite for sport.
Because he remained. And with him, impossibly, she remained too.
Fuck.
Even as blood flooded his mouth, he could taste her.
The memory of her lips lingered like a fever dream, a kindness his mind had forged to keep him tethered to breath.
A light at the end of a tunnel that led nowhere.
He could hear her voice beneath the roar in his skull, feel the ghost of her touch cut clean through the pain.
With every breath he dragged back into his lungs, she remained—a constant, merciless reminder of everything he had lost. Of everything he had never deserved.
Another blow struck him—jaw this time. Bone cracked. His vision flared and dimmed in the same breath. He didn’t bother to groan—just spat the clump of red onto the dirt, head lolling before he forced it up. Stars danced across his vision. Not the pretty kind.
“Yoni!”
The traitor prince’s voice rang cold through the camp.
The rebel stiffened, swore under his breath, and wiped his knife on Ivan’s torn tunic before stepping back. Yoni jabbed a finger toward his face, close enough that Ivan could smell sweat and woodsmoke on him.
“Count yourself fortunate,” he said. “My brother’s a gentler man than I. Were it not for him, I’d have you opened from belly to throat and left for the flies to argue over.”
Ivan met Yoni’s stare through one swollen eye and gave him nothing.
He believed him. The threat lived in the man’s gaze that followed the black veins pulsing beneath Ivan’s torn skin.
Faint now, thinned, writhing like roots trapped beneath frost, waiting for the thaw.
When the stones shattered in the Pit—when the fire Sídhe’s tether frayed and snapped with that sickening sound of ancient power giving way—something in him had broken open as well.
The balance inside him had never been peace.
It had been restraint. A cage built of borrowed power and stubborn will.
And the moment the Sídhe he had bound were freed, death did not come to finish him.
It came to collect.
He had not understood it then. Not until Elara crushed the ring beneath her heel and tore the Sídhe’s power from his veins.
Only in that instant did he realize the four within him had not merely been strength—they had been a dam thrown across a darker current.
And once they were gone, the flood answered.
It had poured through him like black water, and he had lost himself. There was no center then, only the terrible, lucid certainty of being taken. Death had coiled through the hollow spaces inside him, claiming territory it had always been owed.
He’d thought that was the end of it.
And then she kissed him.
Blood had streaked her mouth. Her fingers gripped his jaw with a tenderness he had not deserved.
She kissed him without hesitation, without fear.
Like he was not already damned. Like there was still a man in him worth the trouble.
The taste of her had cut through the dark.
Heat, iron-sweet and fierce, bled into him.
It did not erase what had risen. It did not make him clean.
But it disrupted the current. Threw stone into the flood.
For one breath—one fragile, impossible breath—the pull of death faltered.
He remembered his name.
He remembered how to breathe.
A single drop of Elara’s blood, Sybil had said, voice thin as smoke, and all will be undone. He had not understood whether that had been prophecy or warning. Now, strung in chains, he wondered if it had been both.
Ivan had dismissed it at the time. Refused the weakness of needing it. If the choice had been his, he would have let Death close its hand around his throat before he ever became another burden for her to carry or broken thing she would feel compelled to mend. But she had known.
She had looked at him, and given it freely.
That was her way. Always giving. Even when she had nothing left but stubbornness.
He had seen it from the beginning. The child who burned herself to embers trying to keep others warm.
The girl who believed, with a kind of terrible conviction, that no soul should be left to rot, deserving or no.
It was why he had asked her to pull Thane from the Void.
He had understood exactly what he was wanting of her.
Understood the cost. And he had known she would agree before the words had even left his mouth.
Because Elara did not abandon the lost.
Not even him.
A tightness gathered low in his gut, sharper than the knife wound at his side.
He had counted on that mercy. Built his plan around it.
Trusted that she would not walk away, and in doing so, used the very thing that made her better than the rest of them.
It had never been meant to last. The plan was only ever supposed to buy him time—long enough to distract her while he found another way to free her.
One that did not end with her blood on his tongue.
But nothing ever moved the way he intended.
Not where she was concerned.
Every plan he’d set in motion had fallen apart in his hands. Still…perhaps, in the end, he’d managed one thing. Perhaps he’d saved her. He could live with the wreckage if it meant she didn’t have to.
Ivan finally lifted his head. “Go on, then,” he drawled, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. “Best scurry back to your brother before you attempt an original thought and hurt yourself.”
Yoni’s face twisted.
The blow landed hard and fast. Bone struck bone with a crack that rang through Ivan’s skull. The world lurched sideways, light bursting white behind his eyes before collapsing inward.
Night had nearly swallowed the camp when he surfaced again. Ivan did not rise from sleep so much as claw his way up through it, dragged back by the sting of needle-light draoth biting into his split lip. “You don’t have to do that,” he muttered, as the wound pulled tight.
“Hush,” she snapped, though her hands never lost their care. “You’re ruining my work.”
He pried his eyes open, the effort heavier than lifting steel.
The world steadied just enough for him to see her—Bryn crouched in the dirt before him, narrow shoulders squared, faint light flickering at her fingertips as she coaxed the swelling from his face.
Lavender and mint clung to her—the balm she always used before treating him—but underneath it lingered smoke.
She’d been busy; the scent told its own story.
Others had come before him: rebels, loyalists, fools who had chosen the wrong side, and men who had chosen none at all.
She did not discriminate.
Ivan didn’t protest again. He had learned that much. Bryn possessed an obstinacy that would have suited a queen better than a camp surgeon. Once she decided a thing, it was done. He had yet to see her bend.
Her copper hair was tied at the nape of her neck in a careless knot, strands escaping to brush her cheeks.
The camp’s torchlight caught in it and turned it briefly to flame.
Her face was flushed—exhaustion and focus in equal measure—but her hands did not tremble.
She worked as if this were sacred. As if mending a mouth that had cursed her countrymen was no different than mending one that praised them.
Too good for this place.
Her fingers pressed gently at the corner of his mouth, coaxing the last line of torn skin to knit. “If you split it again, I won’t fix it a second time.”
A lie—and they both knew it. She’d said the same thing the day he was taken, when she’d found him half-dead in the mud. And she had kept saying it every day since, before sitting down beside him to undo the damage her own people had inflicted upon him.
He shifted, and the pole bit into his spine.
The memory of his capture bled back in pieces.
Elara’s eyes first—wide, wounded. Her face had gone pale as he forced her through the Void.
The look of betrayal she gave him before the dark swallowed her.
Then Osin’s shadows—tight around his throat, cold and crushing, drinking the air from his lungs until the world narrowed to a single, suffocating point.
After that, only pain.
Cold cuffs bit into his wrists. A rope cinched tight between his arms, jerking him forward whenever he stumbled.
Hands hauled him through mud and thorn like an animal dragged from a snare.
He remembered the ground more than the sky—the taste of dirt, the sting of briars, the slow grind of his shoulder in the ruts of a road no one had bothered to clear.