Chapter 36
KORITHAX
Ican’t stand to look at her any longer.
She looks hurt, she looks angry, but even more than that, she looks afraid of me. I’d never harm her, never. But I just almost killed Maelkar for simply being her shoulder to lean on.
She’s sitting on the edge of his bed, wrapped in silk that still smells like us, knees drawn to her chest, staring at the floor like it might be able to offer her answers neither of us want to voice.
Her hair is loose, tangled from sleep she couldn’t get beside me. She looks exhausted, and it’s my fault.
I turn away before the thought can dig any deeper, before The Void seizes it and twists it into something else entirely—something darker that sends me over that brutal edge I struggle to return from.
The room feels too small, too quiet. Every breath I take feels like it echoes wrong, like the walls themselves are bracing themselves for me to lose my mind once more.
I leave the room without saying a word, slamming the door behind me.
The corridor outside is cold, made up of dark stone and torchlight. It’s so familiar yet feels so far from what it used to be. Zeriavoss has always answered to me. Its wards humming, its magic recognising my presence like a loyal hound. But now, it recoils.
Torches gutter as I pass, sigils dim, and power bends away from me, not in fear, but in instinct. Like the world itself knows I’m not the same thing that left it three months ago.
I whirl and drive my fist into the stone wall hard enough to crack it. The impact jolts violently up my arm, but the pain barely registers. Deep in my chest, The Void purrs low and satisfied, pleased by the violence and destruction.
Break it, it murmurs, wordless and insidious, slithering through every fractured thought. Break everything.
“Shut up,” I growl under my breath.
It laughs anyway, a dark, pleased sound that curls through my ribs and makes the hairs on my arm stand, as it feeds on my anger as eagerly as it fed on the destruction.
I don’t know where I’m going, I just know I need distance. From her, from him, from the way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t watching. Like she was afraid I might vanish again. Or worse. Like she was afraid I might stay.
I end up in one of the lower training halls which are completely empty at this hour. The air here is stale, thick with old sweat, iron, and magic that’s been burned into the stone from centuries of violence. It feels fitting. Like it’s the only place where I actually belong right now.
I roll my shoulders, flexing my hands. Shadows coil under my skin restlessly, threaded through my hellfire like a sickness that refuses to be cut out.
When I call my flame, it answers, but not cleanly.
Black tar-like substance, so dark it swallows the light, seeps through the black flame, swallowing the edges and devouring the heat instead of feeding it.
I watch it warily, but let it burn anyway.
The first fire strike splits a training post clean in half. The second, reduces it to splinters. By the third, the stone beneath my feet fractures, cracks spiderwebbing out in a violent pattern.
It’s still not enough.
I see her again, unbidden. Daisy standing in the doorway of Maelkar’s chambers. Daisy asleep against his shoulder. Daisy looking peaceful in a place that shouldn’t have felt safe.
She chose him, it croons. You came back from the dead and she still chose to spend the night with him.
Rage explodes through me. I don’t remember moving, only the sound of stone shattering, the air surrounding me screaming, magic tearing free of restraint. My roar shakes the hall, power slamming outwards in a violent wave that rips banners from the walls and sends weapons clattering to the floor.
I’m breathing hard when it finally fades, chest heaving, fists clenched so tightly my nails make my palms bleed.
“She didn’t,” I snarl. “She wouldn’t.”
The Void hums, unconvinced.
I sink down onto the cracked flooring, elbows braced on my knees, head dropping forwards. My thoughts won’t stop spiralling, looping back to the same memories, the same failures.
Aurora’s Veil. The dungeon. Her screams.
I drag a hand through my sweaty, damp, and tangled hair, fingers catching and pulling harder than necessary.
“I tried,” I mutter to the empty hall. “I fucking tried.”
I see it again—her chained, shaking, bleeding, eyes glassy with forced nightmares, drugs, and fear. The way Kaelith touched her in her mind like she was nothing more than a worthless whore. Like she belonged to him.
The Void swells in response, delighted by the memory, by the fury and the pain it dredges up.
You watched, it whispers. And you did nothing.
“I couldn’t,” I snap, slamming my fist into the ground. “I was trapped. I was—”
Weak, it finishes for me.
The word lands like a blade, just as intended. My breath stutters, the truth of it sinking deeper than I want to admit. I was the King of Hell. The Child of Ruin. Her husband. Her mate. And I couldn’t save her.
The Void feeds on that shame, curling tighter around my core, sinking hooks into the places that are breaking more and more with every breath.
You don’t deserve her, it murmurs. But I can make sure no one ever hurts her again.
I close my eyes. For a heartbeat, just once, the promise tempts me. Absolute destruction. No mercy. No restraint. No one left alive to touch her, betray her, or even look at her wrong. I feel the pull of it like gravity. The thought of it has me almost euphoric.
Then I remember the way she looked at me in Maelkar’s room. She wasn’t afraid of my power. She was afraid of me. The image of her fear-filled eyes snaps something loose.
“No,” I say hoarsely, every word a painful strain against The Void’s influence. “You don’t get to decide that.”
The Void recoils inside me, hissing in sharp displeasure at my refusal to bend to it. The sound rakes through my skull, pushing, furious, pressing hard against every weak place it can find.
My knees nearly buckle as I force myself upright. Every muscle trembles with the effort, my body feeling split between what I want, and what it hungers for. But slowly, stubbornly, I straighten my spine.
I don’t know how to rip it out of me yet.
I don’t know how to master it, silence it, cage it before it cages me.
But I know one thing with absolute certainty: it will not use her.
It will not turn Daisy into leverage, into prey, into some prize to be guarded and devoured.
Not while there is breath left in me. Not ever.
I crack my neck, trying to ease the crushing pressure settling across my shoulders and down my spine. The walls of the training hall bear the marks of what I nearly became. Before I can finish destroying the rest of it, along with myself, I turn and force myself out.
The corridors feel longer on the way back. Every step closer to our chambers makes my chest tighten. I don’t know what I’ll find when I open that door. I don’t know if she’ll be asleep, or crying, or sitting there waiting for me with questions I don’t have answers to.
When I finally push the door open, the room is empty.
The bed untouched and cold. Panic flares again, sharp and suffocating, The Void instantly reacting.
I reach for the bond without thinking, following it like a lifeline.
She’s still with him. I feel his presence threaded with shadows and irritation. Maelkar.
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache. Every instinct in me screams to go to her. To find her, touch her, make sure she’s real and still within reach. But I can’t. Not yet.
The Void gnaws at that instinct, twisting it into something uglier.
It begs for destruction—for shattered doors, broken walls, blood on my hands, anything loud enough to drown out the pain and satiate its desires.
It wants me moving, raging, taking. Ignoring it feels like trying to hold back a flood with bare hands.
Instead, I force myself to sit heavily on the edge of the bed we shared only hours ago.
The mattress dips beneath my weight, still carrying the faint warmth and scent of her, which nearly undoes me.
Bracing my elbows on my knees, I force myself to try and breathe through the ache tearing my chest apart.
Each inhale feels jagged, each exhale stolen.
Three months. Three months of watching her suffer. Of her dying without actually dying. Of me being remade into something that might not fit beside her anymore.
I fought so hard once to overcome my fear of love.
All my life, I was taught love was weakness.
A leash. A flaw to be exploited. Kings who loved were buried by it.
Men who cared were made to kneel. I learned early that darkness survives by needing no one.
Then she arrived and ruined every lesson I had ever bled for.
Somehow, impossibly, I loved her. And even worse, I let myself be loved in return. And now that very love has become the easier wound for the monster inside me to claw open. The Void senses it. Hungers for it. Knows she is the softest place in me, and digs into it without mercy.
I never fit her. She was the sun and warmth and stubborn, radiant light.
I was death, shadow, ruin given flesh. We should have burned each other alive.
Instead, it worked. Against reason, against nature, against every law the gods ever tried to impose.
The universe had blessed me with her as my mate—perhaps as repayment for every torment I had endured before her.
A mercy I had never expected to receive.
And now I am right back at the beginning.
Standing in the dark, wondering how something like me could ever remain beside something like her.
I don’t know how to be her husband now. I don’t know how to be anything but a weapon filled with destructible rage.
For the first time since Velentha dragged me back from The Void, the thought that terrifies me most isn’t the war.
It’s the possibility that I came back too broken to deserve her at all.