Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
ZRYNOK
The chapel doors explode inward under my boot.
Crimson haze billows out to meet us—concentrated spores released into the enclosed space, the same trick the Abbot used in our first confrontation.
The thick, fermented weight of it hits my lungs with devastating force.
My blood ignites. The infection that has been quiet since the Garden roars back to life, surging through my veins with hunger that threatens to consume everything.
The wanting crashes over me in waves.
Arwen’s skin against mine. The sounds she made in the storage chamber. The way her body arched beneath me when—
No.
I force the memories aside. Replace them with something sharper.
I want her safe. Want the survivors free. Want every loyalist in this chapel dead so thoroughly that no one ever threatens them again.
The Bloom can’t use desire against someone who desires exactly what he’s already doing.
My sword comes up. My legs carry me forward. And the wanting—the terrible, overwhelming need that should break me—becomes fuel instead of chains.
The first loyalist dies before he can raise his weapon.
The second dies reaching for an alarm bell that will never ring. The third manages to get his blade up, manages to block my first strike, but the second takes his arm and the third takes his head.
Blood sprays across the chapel’s stone floor.
The pews—fitted with restraints, I notice, designed to hold unwilling congregants—become obstacles I navigate without thought.
The stained glass windows paint everything in shades of crimson, light filtering through scenes that depict the Bloom’s supposed divine origins.
The founding of the cult. The first Abbot’s ascension to something more than human.
All of it burning now. All of it dying.
More loyalists pour from the side chambers. A dozen of them. Maybe more. They’ve barricaded themselves in the chapel for their last stand, and they fight with the desperate fury of cornered animals who know death is coming.
I give them what they’re waiting for.
The fighting is brutal.
My sword rises and falls with mechanical precision—the executioner’s rhythm I learned in decades of practice, efficient and unstoppable.
Bodies pile around me. Blood makes the floor treacherous.
The spores keep working on my system, amplifying every sensation until the copper smell of death becomes overwhelming, until the heat of combat feels like fire beneath my skin.
But the wanting doesn’t break me. Not this time.
Every stroke of my blade is a want fulfilled. Every loyalist who falls is one less threat to the woman fighting beside me. Every heartbeat brings us closer to the end of this—to the moment when we can walk out of this monastery and never look back.
A loyalist catches me from the blind side—the left, where my damaged eye leaves gaps in my vision.
His blade slices across my ribs, drawing blood that mingles with the crimson already coating my armor.
The pain registers as distant, irrelevant.
I spin, catch his next strike on my sword, then drive my forehead into his face with force that shatters bone.
He drops. I move on.
Arwen fights at my side.
She’s not a warrior—I know this. Have known it since the moment I met her in the Thornwood, a half-starved escapee who relied on cunning rather than combat to survive. She doesn’t have my training, my strength, my decades of practice with blade and body.
But she has something I don’t: years of learning how cultists think. How they move. Where their faith leaves them exposed.
“Left!” Her voice cuts through the chaos. I pivot, catch the loyalist flanking me with a backhand strike that opens his throat. He gurgles. Falls. Arwen has already moved on, her stolen blade finding gaps in another cultist’s defenses.
She knows where they’re vulnerable. Knows the hesitation that comes before they commit to an attack. Knows the prayers they mutter under their breath and the moments when faith falters and leaves them exposed.
She protects my blind side. Warns me of attacks I can’t see. Moves with me as if we’ve been fighting as a unit for years instead of days.
We carve a path through the chapel’s heart, leaving bodies in our wake.
The loyalists keep coming—emerging from behind the altar, dropping from the galleries above, appearing from shadows that seem to spawn new enemies with every breath. It doesn’t matter. We cut through them anyway.
A cultist lunges for Arwen from behind. I catch his wrist before his blade can connect, twist until bones snap, then throw him into the path of two more attackers. They stumble. My sword finds them before they can recover.
Arwen glances back. Our eyes meet for a single heartbeat—acknowledgment, gratitude, something fiercer burning beneath—then she turns back to the fight.
No words needed. We understand each other without them.
The altar looms ahead. White marble that hasn’t been white in living memory—its surface stained with old blood, carved with channels that direct liquid into collection basins at its base. Behind it, a massive iron frame holds torches that burn with fierce intensity.
And standing before it, blade in hand—
A woman. Older than most of the loyalists, her robes marking her as someone of rank within the cult’s hierarchy. She watches our approach with eyes that hold no fear, no desperation, only the calm certainty of someone who has already accepted her fate.
But she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Arwen.
And Arwen is looking back with recognition that speaks of history. Of pain.
“Go.” Arwen’s voice is steady despite the blood coating her face. “I need to handle this.”
“I can—”
“This one is mine.” Her eyes meet mine. Gray-blue and unflinching. “Clear the rest. Make sure no one escapes through the side doors. I’ll find you when it’s done.”
I shouldn’t leave her. Every instinct screams against separating, against letting her face an enemy alone while I deal with stragglers.
But I see something in her expression that makes me step back.
This is personal. This is about more than survival.
This is about closure.
“I’ll be close.” I move toward the chapel’s eastern wing, where more loyalists are trying to form a defensive line. “Scream if you need me.”
“I won’t need you.” A ghost of a smile crosses her face. “But I’ll scream anyway. Just to see you run.”
Then she’s turning toward the woman at the altar, blade raised, and I’m wading into the remaining loyalists with renewed fury.
The sooner I finish here, the sooner I can watch her back again.