Chapter Twenty-Five #2
She fights like something feral, driving her elbow back into its ribs, once, twice, hard enough to make it buckle, but it doesn’t let go. It drags her another step, another half second further away from me, and that’s all it takes to turn her desperation into something violent.
Her blade flashes up, and she drives it back over her shoulder without looking, the strike landing blind but clean, the rogue jerking behind her as steel finds something vital. It loosens just enough, and she rips it free, then she stumbles forward and comes at me again.
I register it in pieces.
Movement.
Sound.
Her voice, somewhere too far away and too close at the same time.
“Stay with me, Scar.” The words don’t land the way they should.
Everything in me is still locked around the blade, around the intrusion, around the fact of it being there, and the rest of the world is struggling to get through that.
She finally reaches me. Hands hitting me hard, grabbing at my shoulders, my chest, trying to steady me, trying to find the damage, to do something, anything, but I’m not fully there to meet her yet.
Not fully out of it.
Not fully back.
Just… caught.
Between the blade in my side and the sound of her voice, trying to pull me back out of it.
I feel it settle there, real in a place that should be empty, and the sensation spreads outward in a way that isn’t pain, but something heavier.
My focus narrows down to that single point of contact, the awareness of it consuming everything else, the fight, the room, the noise, all dropping away under the sheer fact of it.
I let the fucker in.
That lands harder than the blade.
Three hundred and fifty years of control, of not making mistakes like this, of not leaving openings like that, and I handed him one.
Clean.
Clear.
Final.
Because he got into my head. I let my guard falter out of anger.
Something darker surges up behind the realization, not clean anger but something deeper, something that wants to tear him apart for daring to touch me, for daring to prove that he could.
It pushes hard against everything I’ve built to keep it contained, slamming into that control like a wave hitting a rock, looking for a fracture point to break through.
My jaw locks, the tension running all the way down into my shoulders and spine, every part of me braced, forcing that surge back into line before it can take over the moment.
And underneath it all, there’s something colder.
Not from the blade, but from the realization settling in behind it, clear and undeniable.
This wasn’t luck.
He didn’t find an opening.
He knew exactly where it would be.
Everything else drops away in the same instant.
The room, the others, the fight, all of it receding into nothing as my awareness narrows to that single point of contact, to the foreign presence inside me that shouldn’t exist, that has no right to be there.
And beneath it, cutting through even that, the realization.
This wasn’t chance.
This was his modus operandi all along.
I stop.
The pain registers half a second later. Deep, dark, and spreading, not like a wound but like something dissolving, something working its way inward through pathways that have nothing to do with flesh.
Taking a step back, my hand gripping the handle, I look down.
The blade—ritual-worked, carved from something that has never been simple steel, dark at the edges with dried compound that is already moving through my system like smoke finding gaps in wood.
“A gift,” Mordain says, stepping back, unhurried.
He is watching me the way a scientist watches a reaction reach the phase he predicted.
“Keyed to your bloodline. Keyed to something considerably more specific than that, in fact.” He pauses.
“You’ve carried that guilt for three hundred and fifty years, let it finish the job… rest in peace, Scar.”
Letting out a low, rough growl, my fangs descend as I drive my hand down and rip the blade free. The sound it makes as it leaves my body is wet, something that sticks in the air for a second longer than it should, but whatever was on it doesn’t come out with it.
It’s already inside.
Already moving.
I know this feeling.
The drag of it.
The slow pull toward stillness, toward that heavy, creeping quiet that settles into the body and starts working its way inward, reaching for the edges of consciousness with steady, methodical intent, but this isn’t that.
This is something worse.
This is sharper and faster.
Whatever this is, it doesn’t fit any pattern I’ve seen before.
“Scar—” Cali’s voice is right beside me, no distance left between us, her hands gripping onto me hard enough to matter, one braced at my side, the other at my chest like she’s trying to keep me upright by force alone.
I feel the pressure of it, the urgency in the way she touches me, the way her fingers tighten when she realizes what’s happening under her hands.
“Hey… hey. Stay with me, you asshole!” There’s an edge to her voice.
Something raw and strained, something breaking through that she doesn’t bother to hide.
Her hand presses harder against the wound, trying to stem something that isn’t bleeding the way it should, her gaze locked on my face, searching, tracking every flicker of reaction like she’s trying to measure how far I’m slipping.
“What the fuck did he do?” The question comes out tight, almost breathless, like she already knows the answer isn’t going to be something she can fix quickly.
I feel her shift closer, one knee hitting the ground beside me as she adjusts her hold, refusing to let me drop, refusing to give him that ground.
“Look at me.” Her hand comes up, catching my jaw, forcing my focus toward her whether I want to give it or not, her eyes locked onto mine with a sharp, unrelenting intensity that cuts through the fog trying to settle in.
“Stay with me, Scar.” And for a second, just a second, that’s the only thing that matters.
But this pulls at something I can’t describe.
Something beneath the centuries, the control, and the years of careful framework I have built over the one thing I never let anyone touch.
My healing kicks in, surging toward the wound with everything it has, and the toxin feeds on it.
Every cell I send toward the damage it takes, redirects, and channels inward, and what it channels it toward is not the wound.
It is her face.
Astrid.
The way she looked at the end.
The way she thanked me.
The way I ended it.
“There it is.” Mordain chuckles softly, from somewhere that is already farther away than the room’s dimensions should allow. “That’s what I was waiting for.”
I stumble to my feet, one foot in front of the other, jaw locked so hard my back teeth ache, every muscle in my body fighting the drag of the toxin the way you fight a current, not by overpowering it, because you can’t, but by refusing, second by second, to stop moving.
My hand presses flat against my side where the blade was.
It is warm, and my healing is still trying, but it is useless.
Every attempt pulls me a fraction deeper into the undertow.
Mordain has already moved through the door at the far end of the chamber, retreating into the deeper lab, unhurried as a man finishing a conversation at his own leisure.
I follow him.
Because the only thing in the world worse than what is happening to me right now is letting him reach whatever is waiting on the other side of that door before I do.
My side screams. My vision tilts, steadies, and tilts again. The edges of me are beginning to soften in a way I have spent centuries making sure nothing could reach, and beneath the pull of the toxin, beneath the spreading cold, beneath all of it…
Astrid thanked me.
She fought it for as long as she could.
For you.
I keep stumbling.
The door swings wide on the deeper dark beyond it, and somewhere behind me I can hear the Kings still fighting, still alive, still loud and relentless in the way that only my brothers can be, and ahead of me, Mordain is waiting, patient as a tide.
He doesn’t need to kill me.
He built something better than a kill.
He built a cage out of everything I never let go of, and he just locked the goddamn door.
And the worst part, the part that settles into my chest like the blade did, cold, certain, and deep, is that somewhere in the formation of years of guilt, some part of me doesn’t know if I’ll fight my way out of it.
As I stumble a little farther, the toxin crashing its way through my body, I drop to my knees before I can reach him.
My body is giving out, unable to move. Cali is by my side, yelling something at me, but I can’t hear her.
I can’t think, all I see is Mordain escaping, as everything goes black, my body goes back and hits the floor, and the only thing I see are visions of me killing Astrid.
Over and over again.
This is fucking hell!