Chapter 60 Rose
Rose
Rose’s skin glowed, luminous and healed, from Meera’s bounty of power. As she returned to her secluded cottage, her body felt lighter than air, as if rage itself carried her aloft.
Her mother, Hecate rest her soul, had once told her friends that every witch’s body was a cauldron: What you poured into it determined what boiled out. Tonight, Rose’s was overfull with magic and defiance, her cauldron brimming.
Otherwise, she might have hesitated before standing down in the face of a Lykae attack.
Might have hesitated to use the Riders to neutralize Ditch’s carefully woven traps and containment spells.
The laws of the covenants forbade tampering with another witch’s power.
But needs must; Ditch deserved punishment.
And those traps weren’t really to keep the coven safe. They were to keep two royal Lykae brothers from reaching her, an outcome Rose wanted above all things.
One brother meant to abduct her from the Skein. The other meant to kill her.
And Rose—well, she could’ve gone either way.
Now she felt it like a tremor in her bones: Thane was on his way to the hidden portal no one was supposed to know existed.
Rose had broken worse laws for far less. She’d bartered charms to the stone nymphs for secrets, selling forbidden spells for whispers. What was one more sin when the payoff glittered so bright?
When she’d heard Thane’s rough howl carrying from a distance, she’d laughed. Take her far, wolf, she’d thought. All the way to Gaia. Even now, imagining Ditch’s outrage made Rose smirk, her expression sharp as glass.
The smirk froze when another howl split the night—closer, deeper, threaded with fury.
Rose stilled.
The other brother.
Shouldn’t he be pursuing his prey?
Another call, even nearer, ripped through the trees.
Her stomach plummeted. “To…my house?” she whispered.
The air thickened around her, heavy as vapor. He would find no defenses. Because she had disabled them all.
Another howl. Too near this time. The walls shivered with it.
Her pulse pounded like a drum in her throat. A rampaging wolf was the fear she could never quite banish, the nightmare that returned whenever she closed her eyes…
Concentrate. Stay calm.
Meera’s wrath roiled inside her. Rose was fully empowered, could turn a Lykae into a smear right now. Her palms radiated light. Her glow spread, searing through her clothes, veins incandescent. Rose’s cauldron had been set over ungodly heat and sealed too tight. Pressure building, ready to blow—
Her door exploded inward.
A shape filled the frame, shoulders brushing the splintered wood, the moon clinging to his naked body like smoke.
The male from her nightmares.
I know him.
Blood streaked his face and regenerating throat. When his fevered eyes locked on her, memories crashed over Rose.
She clutched her head as a past life from eons ago poured through her mind in a cascade of pain and revelation. A red riding hood as a girl. Training for high priestesshood. Beloved by my coven. A wolf in the shadows. Screams. Blood.
His name came to her like a curse:
Straegan.
King Thane’s younger brother. Her murderer. The one who had devoured her.
Not some ancestor, not a distant beast buried in story and dust, but the same creature breathing before her now.
Her lungs seized. She could still hear her grandmother’s scream as his claws raked through her neck, scythes through grass. She could still feel his attack, the wet punch of his fangs embedded in her chest. Pain flashed alive again, agony rippling under Rose’s skin, ancient and fresh all at once.
Straegan stepped toward her, lips curled back in a snarl.
For one suspended heartbeat, Rose stared into the maw that had once ended her.
This time, she didn’t hesitate to defend herself.
She screamed a piercing cry and cast off every restraint she’d ever held.
Magic detonated out of her.
A storm of light tore through the air. The cottage walls buckled under the shock wave. Straegan was hurled backward through collapsing stone, engulfed in a wildfire of power that leveled the Witchwood beyond.
And when silence fell, it was total—save for the faint hiss of her own power, still boiling over in the ruins around her. Ash snowed down, the world recoiling from her.
She had survived him this time. Her bones hummed with the truth of it:
I am not the girl he devoured.
I am not prey.
Not anymore.
Memories continued to flood in but not yet all. Why had he targeted her? Why had he dug for her very heart?
Somewhere in the distance, a howl echoed. Wounded but enraged, promising return.
Rose didn’t flinch. She lifted her glowing palms, the air warping around her fingertips, and whispered to the broken night: “I will repay his torture a thousand times over.”
The words trembled with power.
The wasted Witchwood trembled with them.
And as her magic seethed—hungry and uncaged—Rose stepped into the moonlight, a witch reborn from her own destruction.