Chapter Twenty-Six #3
A rogue breaks through the edge of the fight, drawn to the opening, but it never reaches us.
Hellfire tears across the chamber in a controlled arc, black-orange and violent, while Holy Light slams into it from the opposite direction, the two forces locking together into a contained barrier that cuts off the battlefield behind me.
Rhett and Bennett move in perfect alignment, their power holding the perimeter without spilling into the center, ensuring nothing else interferes with what’s happening here.
Mordain feels it.
All of it.
The shift in pressure, the layered interference, the way the fight is no longer something he can isolate and control. His focus sharpens fully onto me now, the last trace of detached observation gone, replaced with something more intent.
Mordain blasts through one of Roxy’s threads and launches himself at me before the magic has even finished snapping apart. The shift is immediate.
Gone is the careful bullshit.
Gone is the patience.
The next punch detonates against my guard and sends me stumbling backward. Pain shoots up both arms, and I barely get reset before another one follows.
Then another.
I give ground because the alternative is ending up on my ass.
Every hit feels like getting clipped by a truck.
He is stronger, still faster in ways that matter.
But he is no longer alone in the fight.
The ground beneath his feet freezes mid-step, Raze’s power ripping outward in jagged lines of ice that lock his footing in place with sudden, brutal precision.
The movement he was already committed to stalls, his balance caught between forward momentum and forced stillness.
It won’t hold him for long, nothing will, but it doesn’t need to.
Everything tightens around that moment.
Roxy’s magic constricts again, threads pulling taut as she reinforces the hold.
Ruckus bends the angle just enough to keep him from finding clean leverage.
Rhett and Bennett hold the line, the roar of their combined power keeping the edges of the battlefield clear.
And I move.
There’s no hesitation left in me now, no adjustment or second thought, just a straight, committed line from where I stand to where he’s locked in place, every part of me aligned with the strike before it even lands.
He sees it coming.
He tries to break free.
The ice fractures under the force of it, cracking in sharp lines as he tears against it, Roxy’s threads snapping one by one under the strain, his body fighting to reassert control, but it’s already too late.
Bringing my hand up, the stake drives forward with everything I have behind it, both hands locked in place, all of that speed and strength focused into a single, brutal point of contact. I feel the resistance when it hits, heavy and real, something that doesn’t want to give even now.
And then it does.
The wood punches through, breaking past what’s left of his defenses, sinking deep into his chest with a force that carries all the way through.
For a moment, everything stops.
Not the fight.
Him.
Mordain goes still in a way that nothing living should ever be still, his body locking around the strike. He remains upright for several seconds, held there by sheer will alone, his gaze dropping to the stake buried in his chest before lifting again to meet mine.
There’s something there I didn’t expect.
Awareness.
Not of me.
Of something beyond me.
His focus shifts past my shoulder, and I feel it before I understand it, something pulling my attention in the same direction.
Scar staggers to the doorway, barely upright, one hand braced against the frame as if the building itself is holding him in place. His red eyes are unfocused but locked onto this moment with a stubborn, impossible presence that shouldn’t exist after what Mordain did to him.
Mordain sees him.
And in that instant, something in his expression changes.
His mouth moves, the effort dragging through what little strength he has left, the words costing him everything he’s still holding onto.
“Astrid loved you.” Mordain’s voice barely carries, scraped thin and ragged at the edges, but the silence in the ruined lab makes it carry anyway.
“Even through the madness. Even at the end…” Mordain pauses, and what crosses his face in those final seconds isn’t triumph.
It isn’t even regret. It’s something that might have been awe, a long time ago, before it curdled.
“She was always stronger than my formulas, stronger than the torpor venom running through your veins,” he mumbles, then Mordain drops to the ground.
And behind me, I hear Scar’s breathing change.
It isn’t grief that takes him this time, not the way it was before, not the raw and ragged thing I’ve watched him carry.
This is different, deeper, and more absolute.
The torpor venom wraps around those words like it has been waiting for exactly this moment to pull him under completely.
A soft sound leaves him, barely a murmur, as though some part of him is still trying to hold on.
Then his knees hit the floor.
Shit!
Then the rest of him follows, slow and inevitable as a tree finding the ground.
The lab goes quiet except for the distant sound of the Kings fighting their way through the last of it, the faint hiss of something burning in the walls, and my own heartbeat, too loud and too fast in the ringing aftermath.
I drop to my knees beside him, my hand catching his jaw, forcing his face toward me as I search for something, anything, that tells me I haven’t already lost him.
His body doesn’t collapse.
He doesn’t hollow out the way vampires do when it’s over, when whatever animates them finally lets go. His body holds, rigid and contained, like something inside him has been forced into stillness rather than extinguished.
Relief hits hard enough to make my hands shake.
He is still here.
He is just not with me.
The cage has closed.
I press my forehead briefly against his temple and stay there for one breath, two, letting myself feel the full weight of whatever this is, the man who came into a burning compound half poisoned and still followed me through it, the man who has been carrying three hundred and fifty years of guilt like a wound he wouldn’t let close, finally allowed to rest.
Then I straighten.
I pull his arm across my shoulders, brace my legs, and lift.
The huntsman has completed her task.
The war she came here to fight is over.
But the monster who kept dragging her back to life is the one who won’t wake.
And that changes everything.