Chapter 42
Ellaryn lay sprawled on the cold stone floor of the dungeon, her ribs throbbing with every ragged breath. Each inhale stabbed like shards of glass, a cruel reminder of the beating she had endured.
She pressed her hands to the cold stone beneath her, as if the rough surface could anchor the chaos in her chest. She willed her pulse to slow, willed her ragged breath to even out, and forced every trembling nerve into stillness.
All she could think about was Sailen.
She hoped he was safe. Needed him to be.
Gods… how could she have been so stupid? Letting Damien follow her like that.
She should have known he had it out for her.
Should have known he would try something like this.
A sharp, jagged pain shot through her body as she tried to shift. Her arm screamed in protest, and her ribs flared with every shallow breath. She was sure something was broken—probably more than one thing.
If she weren’t in so much pain, she would have battered the walls until her fists bled. But she couldn’t move. Not without agony slicing through her chest and limbs.
The darkness pressed in on her from every side, thick and suffocating. She hated the dungeons—hated how they toyed with one’s mind, how they twisted fear into something inescapable.
Time stretched endlessly. Seconds felt like an eternity. Minutes bled into hours. Every sound echoed, every shadow seemed to reach for her.
All she could do was cling to one thought: Sailen. Keep him safe. Somehow, she had to keep him safe.
Damp stone pressed at her vision; seams between the bricks pulsed faintly, as though the castle itself were breathing. The walls whispered—low and intimate, curling into her ears.
I know your deepest fears.
She flinched and clapped her hands over her ears, nails digging into skin. She wondered when the voices would come. The King had lanced every brick with magic; she knew that much. The dungeons were not meant to hold bodies. They were meant to break minds first—souls later.
“It’s not real,” she whispered hoarsely. “It’s not real.”
Hearing her own voice helped, grounding her amid the disembodied screaming and taunts. She clung to the mantra, repeating it through clenched teeth.
The chains around her wrists were impossibly heavy. On a good day, Ellaryn was strong—but now her chest felt crushed inward, breath barely reaching her ribs. Every inhale took effort. Every exhale burned. She could hardly lift her arms.
Then she saw the faces.
Her spine went rigid against the stone.
They emerged from the shadows one by one—the same faces Xander had shown her in her stolen memories. The people she had ruined. The proof of her nickname.
She scrambled backwards until her shoulders struck brick, wishing she could dissolve into it, shrink small enough to disappear.
They didn’t vanish.
They were here. Breathing when she breathed. Boots scuffing dust from the floor, footsteps echoing just as hers had once done. It took everything she had to lift her manacled wrists and rub her eyes.
They weren’t real. She knew that.
But in the dungeon, the line between nightmare and truth was thin.
And her resolve was thinner.
They stared at her with pale faces, blood leaking from eyes and mouths, expressions frozen between grief and rage, as though they couldn’t decide whether to scream, cry, or kill her the way she had killed them.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
They stepped closer. Arms hung stiffly at their sides, movements jerky, wrong, like corpses forced upright by a cruel hand.
Had the King grown powerful enough to do this?
Were they here to finish her?
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, voice faltering. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s too late for that.” One of them snarled, neck-breaking and snapping at an impossible angle.
Ellaryn gasped, and the chains rattled as she brought trembling hands to her mouth. Every movement hurting.
Then they began to fall.
Bodies collapsed in on themselves as they dropped, hitting the stone with wet, splitting thuds—exactly the way she had left them. Not whole. Not living. Folded where bone had given way. Torn where flesh had refused to stretch any further.
They fell onto her.
Ellaryn screamed as the first body struck, its weight caving her bruised ribs inward with a sickening pressure. Something soft burst beneath her shoulder and the breath fled her lungs.
Another dropped across her legs.
Then across her chest.
They were warm.
Not the warmth of life—the warmth of meat.
Rot flooded her nose, thick and sweet and wrong. Blood—old and new—slicked across her lips, seeping into her mouth when she gasped. It tasted like iron and something fouler, something that had lingered too long in the heat.
She tried to move.
A hand collapsed beneath her palm, the skin sloughing loose as her fingers pushed through it. It peeled away like wet parchment.
She choked.
More bodies fell.
A skull struck her collarbone with a crack. A jaw hung loose beside her cheek, its mouth frozen open in a silent scream, teeth slick with blackened blood. Empty sockets stared into her.
Accusing.
Knowing.
The weight grew unbearable. Crushing. Suffocating. Their limbs bent around her, wrong, boneless, wrapping her in a cage of ruined flesh. Their blood soaked through her clothes, warm at first—then cooling. Thickening. Glueing her to them.
She couldn’t breathe.
She opened her mouth to scream, but something thick slid across her tongue.
Blood.
It filled her mouth.
Filled her throat.
She gagged, but there was nowhere for it to go.
Nowhere to run.
Nowhere to escape the bodies she had made.
They kept falling.
Kept piling.
Until the last thing she saw was darkness closing in, and the last thing she felt was their dead weight pressing her into the stone, as if the world itself were trying to bury her with them.
She writhed beneath them, gurgling, suffocating for what felt like hours—
And then… they were gone.
Ellaryn collapsed forward, hands flying to her head as she shook violently.
“They weren’t real,” she whispered. “They weren’t real.”
She dug her nails into her palms until blood welled, desperate for something—anything—real. She couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything anymore. Pain lived in her bones, her veins, her skin.
She was pain.
Then she saw him.
Eden.
He stood a few paces away, smiling softly—the same smile Xander had shown her in memory. Warm. Gentle. Real enough to steal her breath.
“Eden,” she whispered, disbelief blooming into hope, as a tear slid down her cheek. He had come for her. To protect her.
Her angel.
Then his smile stretched.
Too wide. Too tight.
His head tilted at an impossible angle, vertebrae misaligned beneath torn skin, as though something had snapped him and carelessly set him back together wrong. His dead eyes locked onto hers.
Ellaryn shuffled backwards, chains shrieking against stone.
“What have you become?” he snarled.
As he spoke, a tooth slipped loose from his mouth and struck the floor with a hollow click. Then another. They fell one by one, clattering between them.
“You’re not real,” she whispered, shaking her head. “You’re not real.”
“Oh,” he breathed, stepping closer, joints cracking with each movement, “but I am.”
Cold fingers seized her chin, forcing her head up.
“Look at me.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, her spine locking rigid as iron.
“I SAID LOOK AT ME.”
His voice detonated through the dungeon, rattling chains, vibrating through bone. Dust shook loose from the ceiling. She flinched—
—and opened her eyes.
They had once been blue. Endless. The kind of blue that made her feel small in a good way.
Now they were grey.
Not dull—no. Churning. Like stormwater thick with ash. Something moved beneath the surface, something that dragged everything it touched downward.
“You should have died that day,” he hissed.
His grip tightened, and her jaw popped painfully.
“You didn’t deserve to live.”
“I didn’t want to live,” she sobbed, the confession tearing free of her. “I wish I hadn’t.”
His mouth split wider at that—not into a smile, but into something wrong. The skin at the corners cracked, blood trickling down his chin.
“Mum and Dad hate you,” he said softly.
The words landed harder than any blow.
“They always have.”
Something inside her fractured.
“I’m sorry,” she choked. “I’m so sorry.”
“You always were Ruin,” he whispered, leaning closer until she could smell the earth in his lungs. “And you always will be.”
Her vision blurred, the dungeon walls seeming to lean inward, the air thinning, tightening around her throat.
“I’ll do better,” she begged. “I promise. I’ll fix it. I’m going to fix it.”
His expression changed then.
Not anger.
Not fury.
But pity. Disgusting, inescapable pity.
“There’s nothing you could ever do, little sister,” Eden said gently, “to make it right.”
And that was worse.
That was the blade.
The truth settled into her chest like a stone dropped into deep water. Heavy. Final.
Forgiveness was not waiting for her.
Redemption was not waiting for her.
Only an ending.
She would kill the King.
And when she did—she would let herself die with him.
And somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the horror, beneath the suffocating weight of guilt—she felt the smallest flicker of relief.
Because that, she thought dimly, was exactly what she deserved.