Chapter Twenty-Six #3
It opens up with Legend dragging me through the royal gateway after Rathe U, after I was attacked, my body limp in his arms, his own expression a mask of fury.
Creed watched him then, seeing the panic his brother tried to hide beneath rage and the desperate way he held me like he thought I’d disappear.
The scene tears away and another takes its place.
Creed in his rooms, sleepless and pacing, trying to read me and failing, failing, failing while I laughed and sharpened knives and learned Rathe like I’d always belonged there.
I can feel his frustration, but there is something else under it now in hindsight.
Curiosity. Wariness. The first little crack in what he believed about me.
Another.
Legend after sending me back to Exile.
Gods.
I feel that one like a knife.
Creed, he didn’t sleep. He stands on a balcony holding a magical mirror showcasing—me. Me, alone on the island after I thought Legend chose Arabella. Creed watches me, one palm pressed to his chest, the other tracing the shape of me in the mirror.
Another memory comes so fast it nearly snaps my head back.
Me returning to Rathe.
The pride that hits Creed when he sees what I have become is sharp, quiet, and unwilling—but it’s there.
He watches me move through the palace with black fire under my skin and dragons at my back, a hidden smile curling his lips.
But pride is replaced by gut-wrenching guilt so deep, my own stomach coils in on itself, pain wracking my body.
Another.
The books. The codex. The old scripts. Creed hunched over them while the palace slept, reading until his eyes burned.
Searching until he found the first hints of what I was and what the Drakaryth meant.
Answer about the dragons, soul stones, and the first flame, and every answer dragging him further from the lie he helped build.
Then Cosima.
Her voice low and maddeningly calm.
The blood of one.
My own runs cold at the memory.
At the time, the words only lodged in him like splinters. Now, I feel the moment they became a knife. I feel him understand, really understand, what the island took when Legend carried me off its cliffs the first time.
Not just a piece of power. Not just magic. Ethos. Soul.
The exact thing Arabella’s thread kept snagged and crippled inside his brother. To break it fully, to free Legend, to give me a chance to survive what came next—
The island had to be fed.
“No,” I whisper again inside the memory this time, but Creed doesn’t hear me because this is already done, already chosen.
He runs.
That is the next thing I know.
He tears away from the fight while Arabella holds Legend in place, while I drown and burn and scream through the bond.
Creed runs not from cowardice but toward certainty.
He runs for the cavern. Runs for the Isles Kiss.
Runs with the knowledge blooming in him like poison that this is the only move left.
His grief is with him.
His shame too.
So much shame.
For the false bond. For the months stolen from Legend. For every moment I was hurt because he panicked and chose stability over truth. It rides him all the way into the cavern where the flowers open for him, as if they know exactly what he has come to do.
He kneels at the center of them. Then. for the first time in all the memories, he thinks of me directly.
Haide.
The name is soft in his head, softer than I ever heard him say it aloud.
He presses one hand to the black soil between the blooms and the island answers immediately, roots and thorns winding up around his wrists like old friends.
There is pain—a lot of it. I feel it in a sick burst, the Isles Kiss drinking deep as the soul begins to come loose from the flesh; and still he doesn’t fight.
He welcomes it.
Tears spill from his eyes. In these final moments, he knows with a terrible, perfect clarity that there is no coming back from this. And the root of who he is—a strong, noble king— is okay with it.
His last thoughts come slower, each one dragged through pain so vivid it makes my own breath hitch while I’m still kneeling over his body.
I was wrong about you, Haide the Drakaryth.
The flowers tighten.
You are not the poison in our veins.
His hands shake, mouth quivering.
You, future queen of Rathe, are the air in our lungs.
I break on that one.
Somewhere in the present I know I’m sobbing, but the memory keeps moving, merciless and complete.
In the memory, Creed lifts his head as the soul is pulled from him strand by strand.
He thinks of Legend then. His little brother with too much darkness and too much heart beneath all that violence.
He thinks of the child he helped raise, and the king he failed and the man he loves enough to die for without resentment.
Then me again.
And his next thought is so gentle, it hurts more than anything else in this cursed fucking cavern. “In another life, I think I would have loved you… Maybe even in this one.”
Another tear slides down his face. Finally, the oldest Deveaux brother, and King of Rathe, smiles.
“You are perfect for him. I am honored to give you my soul. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, I’ll be safe with you. Rathe will be safe because of you.”
The Isles Kiss blooms wider, the black thorns lifting.
His final breath shudders out of him while the flowers shine. The last thing he sends into the world, before there is nothing left of him but the shell under my hand, is a whisper so tender it flays me alive.
Save him.
The memory ends.
I crash back into myself so hard I nearly vomit.
The cavern spins. My hands are still on Creed’s face. My tears continue dropping onto his skin, onto the black petals, onto the thorns that cradle him like something precious—because he fucking is.
For a second, I can’t separate my grief from his, my rage from his regret, my lungs from the memory of his final breath.
“Creed,” I choke out, though there’s no point in saying his name now. But I need to hear it leave me one more time. “Creed, you stupid, self-sacrificing, royal pain in my fucking ass—”
My voice snaps.
The cavern goes very still.
So still that I notice it instantly.
No rumble in my chest.
No dark hand holding me from the inside.
No velvet threat brushing the back of my mind.
The Nightkin.
Fear slides cold and vicious down my spine.
I straighten slowly, wiping at my face with shaking hands while my heart starts to hammer for an entirely new reason. The soul stone at my temple throbs once, then again, but the familiar masculine presence that should be curled somewhere beneath my ribs has gone silent.
“Beast?”
I push to my feet too fast and sway, catching myself on the cavern wall while the flowers below shiver at the movement.
“Nightkin.”
Still nothing.
The empty space inside me yawns wider.
No.
No, no, no.
The final memory slams into place with fresh horror.
Save him.
Creed fed the island his soul. He fed his fucking soul to give it something back.
To change the balance.
My head jerks toward the mouth of the cavern.
Legend.
My eyes snap back to Creed’s body.
It feels so fucking wrong to leave him here, but he didn’t die to be cried over.
He died for us.
My grief doesn’t lessen; it fucking sharpens into the deadliest of blades.
The souls of the fallen dragons pulse brighter, and then my back bows, eyes snapping wide open as something else fills me.
A new darkness coats my insides. Power swells within me, sweeping over me.
It fucking consumes me until all I am is a ball of energized fury.
Black flames lick across every inch of my skin, alive and hot.
I look down at Creed one last time, the Isles Kiss glowing softly around him, and press my fingertips to my mouth before touching them to his forehead.
“Thank you, King Creed Deveraux,” I whisper, tears still running freely because fuck pride, fuck composure— fuck all of it. “I will be the best fucking queen your home has ever seen, and I will do it for you.”