Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
Alyssa
It wasn’t until the pain started to recede that I realised I’d collapsed.
A strong pair of arms clutched me tight, as fingers threaded through my hair. The relief of it all finally being over was almost overwhelming. I could feel a dampness on my cheeks and wondered if I’d been crying through the agonising pain or if it was just the relief that had brought them on.
I didn’t know how they’d done it, but they must come for me. My mates had saved me.
“You scream so beautifully,” Arik whispered, My vision cleared and I watched in horror as he lifted a lock of my hair and twisted it around his fingers, watching the strands like it was something he’d never seen before.
“You know, I think she made you for me. The other half of me. It was always supposed to be you and me, sister. Haven’t you realised that? ”
I surged out of his arms, recoiling at the idea of him touching me, let alone what he was suggesting. But the smile he gave me as I dragged myself away was the kind you give a child acting out and it turned my stomach.
Arik really had lost his mind.
“Would you give yourself to me, Alyssa?” he asked, his smile turning deadly. “Would you give yourself to me willingly if it would save them? Can’t you feel it? You have those pesky bonds with those filthy shifters. Can’t you feel them dying?”
My body was bombarded with sensation then and I realised that the pain wasn’t mine alone. My mates were suffering. They were injured, exhausting. Holding on with the last of their reserves. And it was the last. I could already feel the bonds starting to strain
“No.”
It was such a small word, but I didn’t have enough left in me for anything bigger, and Arik wasn’t worth bigger anyway. He’d asked me to choose between saving five men and keeping my own self, and the answer was no. That was the end of any conversation we were ever going to have.
His head tilted. The smile didn’t move.
“Are you sure, sister? They’re so very tired. So very close to the end. One word, and you save them.”
“You don’t get to use them against me.”
“Don’t I?” The smile sharpened. “Sister. You’re already letting me. Every second you stand here is a second they don’t have.”
He was right. And I hated him even more for it.
Every breath I let him take in this place was a heartbeat my mates didn’t have.
Tank. Maddox. Dean. Ryder. Damon. The bonds were a chorus of pain at the back of my mind, five separate voices fraying at the edges, and Arik knew exactly what he was doing.
Distract. Delay. Make me waste myself on words while his creatures finished what his power had started.
I’d walked into this thinking I could kill him, and I’d been wrong.
Even with everything I had thrown at the core of what he was, it hadn’t even made him flinch. The realm hadn’t let me. The realm couldn’t let me. Arik was woven from the same fabric as Nymeria, and the realm couldn’t be turned against its own foundations.
So either there was no way to end this, or there was some other way that I couldn’t see yet.
I closed my eyes and reached for the bonds. They felt frayed and fading, but there. Thankfully still there. Through them I could sense the battlefield outside. The blood. The exhaustion. The way the men I loved were holding the line with the last of themselves because they trusted me to come back.
And in that moment, with Arik’s voice crooning through the dark and my mates dying outside, I saw it.
The realm hadn’t let my magic kill him. But it hadn’t stopped me from trying. The magic had just refused to flow in one direction, with that specific intention. It had refused to destroy. It hadn’t refused to do anything else.
Arik was woven from the same fabric as the realm.
Killing him was like trying to tear out a single thread without unravelling the whole thing.
The realm wouldn’t allow it. Of course it wouldn’t.
Because destroying Arik meant destroying a part of him.
Trying to remove him by force was too violent and this realm had been bathing in so much violence, for so long.
It was time to make a different choice.
One less violent, but horrific all the same.
Because what we needed her was an unweaving. Unmaking.
Which was something entirely different.
Killing was violence from the outside. Force applied to a thing that resisted. It was what Arik expected. What he was built to withstand. His entire existence was a fortress designed to endure assault, because assault was all he had ever known.
But unmaking was something else. Unmaking required going deeper.
Not attacking the fortress but dissolving it.
Not breaking the walls but removing the foundation they stood on.
And then all the energy and strands that had made Arik needed to be woven into something else.
It would be easy enough to do with the physical parts of him, but there was also his essence, the spark that made him Arik.
It would need a place to go. Not still as the man he was, but the echo of life that had once been.
And there was only one way that I could see us achieving that. I would have to hold every piece of what he was. Every memory. Every century of pain. Every moment of rage and loneliness and the terrible, corrosive conviction that he was worthless.
I would have to carry it.
Arik would cease to exist, but the horror of what he was would live on in my own memories. In the darkest recesses of my mind.
The realisation landed like a stone in still water.
Carry him. Not briefly. Not temporarily.
Forever. An unbinding would absorb his existence into mine.
The unmade pieces would weave into the fabric of the realm the way ashes dissolve into soil.
But the pain, the centuries of accumulated suffering, those would live inside me.
A weight I would bear for the rest of my existence, which, if the realm sealed around me the way I could already feel it preparing to do, would be a very long one indeed.
Nymeria had wanted me to take her place and it would be unending.
The cost was not death. It was something harder than death. It was choosing to carry your enemy’s pain inside you for eternity and doing it anyway because the alternative was letting him destroy everything you loved.
The bonds tugged. Frayed but holding. Five men bleeding for me on a battlefield I couldn’t see.
There was no choice. There had never been a choice. I had walked into this knowing it would cost me, even if I hadn’t known the real cost.
When I opened my eyes, Arik was watching me. The smile had thinned. Something behind it had begun to fray. Whatever I had let show on my face, he had read it, and he didn’t like what he was reading.
“What are you doing?”
“Something I should have done at the start.”
I reached for the magic again. Not to throw at him. Not to break against his foundations. Just to hold. The way you hold a candle in cupped hands so the wind can’t take the flame.
He felt the shift. I knew because his expression cracked.
“Don’t.”
It was the first honest word I had heard him say.
I crossed the distance between us. Not running.
Walking. The way you walk towards something that has been screaming for centuries and finally gone quiet.
He stepped back. I kept walking. He flinched when I lifted my hand and I almost stopped at that, at the sight of him flinching the way a child flinches from a hand that has only ever been used to strike.
But I didn’t stop. I cupped his face, and he went rigid under my palm.
I knew he couldn’t really hurt me in this place, because it was mine. It was part of Nymeria and our mother had gifted all of herself to me. Arik might be able to enter this place, but he had no control over it. He’d never really had control over any of it.
“What are you doing?” he asked again. Smaller this time.
“I see you. All of you. The hope and the flaws. The wanting and the loneliness. The boy she made and the man she abandoned.”
He tried to pull away. The realm had brought us into contact and the realm wouldn’t let go.
“Stop.”
“I see what she did to you. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Stop.” He was struggling now, but he couldn’t escape, because I didn’t want him to.
Arik’s voice cracked. The way a child’s voice cracks when they have been holding back tears for too long.
“You were enough,” I said. “From the very first moment. You were enough, and the only thing that was ever wrong was that no one ever told you.”
He shattered.
I didn’t know how else to describe it. The thing that had been Arik, the predator with the indulgent smile, the King of Endless, the man who had taken courts and slaughtered the people inside them, fell away in pieces under my hand.
All that was left was the boy. The first creation.
The one who had opened his eyes to a beautiful world and been told, within an hour of his existence, that he was wrong.
He sobbed.
It was the most terrible sound I’d ever heard.
The dam of centuries breaking. Every scream he had buried.
Every wail he had swallowed. Every cry that had echoed through an empty world with no one left to hear it.
All of it pouring out of him at once. I held him.
The way Nymeria should have held him. The way someone should have held him long before this. With both hands. With my whole self.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the dark. “I’m so sorry, brother.”
He clung to me.
For a long, formless moment we stayed there. Two children of a god who hadn’t known how to mother either of them. One of us holding. One of us being held. I felt the centuries of his pain pressing against me, asking permission to let go.
And I finally gave it to him.