Chapter 23 #3
And her. The fae assassin who had come to kill him and somehow ended up married to him instead.
“What now?” she whispered.
Raziel looked at her. Then at the corpses of his siblings. Then at the fireplace where his grandmother had met her end. And finally, at the Rosov vampires who were still staring at them like they expected to be executed at any moment.
One of them—a young woman with amber eyes and hair the color of wheat—took a hesitant step forward. “What… what would you have us do, Lord—Lord Nostrom?”
The title hung in the air like a question. Like a challenge. Because Raziel wasn’t just a lord anymore, was he? With his family dead and Lilivra destroyed, he was something more. Something unprecedented.
He was the sole heir to the most powerful vampire dynasty in Runne. And with no one left to challenge him, no ancient puppeteer pulling his strings, he could become anything he wanted to be.
“Go,” Raziel said quietly. “Tell everyone that Lilivra is dead. Tell them that she was fae. That vampires have never existed. That what comes next…” He glanced at Nadi, and something passed between them—an understanding that went beyond words. “What comes next will be different.”
The vampires fled without another word, their footsteps echoing through the ruined ballroom as they made their escape.
Whether they would deliver his message or simply disappear into the night, Nadi couldn’t say.
But it didn’t matter. Word would spread, regardless.
The death of Lilivra—the original vampire, the architect of the fae exile—would send shockwaves through every corner of Runne.
Everything was about to change.
“Now,” he said slowly, “we decide what kind of world we want to build.”
She almost laughed. Almost cried. “That’s… terrifying.”
“Yes.” He helped her to her feet, keeping one arm around her waist when her legs threatened to give out again. “But we’ve been surviving ‘terrifying’ for a long time now, little murderer. I think we’ve earned the right to try something else.”
“Like what?”
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the ruin around them—the blood, the bodies, the shattered windows letting in the cool night air. Then he looked at her, and something in his expression softened in a way that still caught her off guard, even after everything.
“Living,” he said simply. “Together. For however long we have.”
It wasn’t a promise of safety. It wasn’t a guarantee of happiness. They would face challenges that might tear them apart. They would make enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy them.
But they would face it together.
Bound by blood. Bound by marriage. Bound by something that went deeper than either—the simple, terrifying, miraculous fact that they had chosen each other. Again and again and again, through betrayal and violence and the machinations of ancient monsters, they had chosen each other.
And they would keep choosing each other, for as long as they both drew breath.
Nadi leaned into Raziel’s side, feeling his arm tighten around her. The two moons were visible through the shattered windows—Father moon full and bright, Mother moon a dark shadow against the star-scattered sky. Together, as they always were. As they always would be.
She thought about everything that had led them here.
The massacre of her family all those decades ago.
The years of training, of hardening herself into a weapon.
The infiltration of the Nostrom household, the twisted game of seduction and betrayal that had somehow become something real.
The coffin. The Wild. The wedding in a glowing cavern deep beneath the earth, where they’d spoken vows whose superstitions neither of them had truly believed.
And yet here they were. Alive. Together. Victorious, in a way that neither had ever imagined.
“I love you,” she said softly. “You know that, right? After everything—after all the lies and the manipulation and the blood—you know that what I feel for you is real.”
“I know.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, his lips lingering against her skin. “I love you too. More than I ever thought myself capable of loving anything. More than the throne, more than power, more than vengeance. For however long we live—”
“We shall live together.” She finished the words for him, the words from their wedding vow, and felt something warm bloom in her chest despite all the death around them. “Or not at all.”
Raziel smiled—not his predatory grin, not his cruel smirk, but something soft and genuine and real.
The smile of a man who had everything he’d ever wanted, standing in the ruins of everything he’d been told to become.
It was the smile of the frightened child he’d once been, before Lilivra’s whispers had turned him into a monster.
Perhaps that child wasn’t entirely dead, after all.
Perhaps neither of them was beyond saving.
“Come on,” he said, steering them toward the door. “We have a world to burn down.”
Leaning on each other like the broken, bloodied creatures they were, the Serpent and his assassin walked out into the night.