CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ronan
HE HEARD HER BEFORE HE SAW HER.
A voice drifting through the trees, a lure meant for prey.
Leather split, muscle giving way as wings tore free from the shadow where Ronan knelt at the cliff’s edge.
Below, the Firen Forest festered, a scar in the world, home to the beasts left behind when hel’s portal sealed shut.
But some of them wore beauty like a blur.
The mortals stumbled through bramble and bone-thick thorns, lungs rasping with every failing breath.
She had been chasing them for over a mile now. They thought the dark might hide them, that if they crawled beneath brush and held their silence, she would miss them.
Ronan knew better. Knew the predator she had become.
Still, he did not move. They weren’t worth breaking cover yet. So he sat, where stillness still slept, and listened.
Her voice weaved through the trees again, familiar enough to cut, mellow enough to beg belief. But beneath every syllable, there was a fracture. A note that was too tantalizing—
As if a part of her still longed to be free.
A long, pitchy howl split the forest. A dire wolf, its call breaking through the sound of the screams.
She had found them.
The metallic stench drifted up to the cliff where he watched, copper and rot clinging to the air, gnawing at his tongue, curdling down his throat.
She had cover here. The forest’s density would cloak her, smother sound, swallow blood, bury the evidence.
All of it laid out below him like a viridescent blanket.
He wanted to burn it bare, reduce it to ash. To show them all what writhed beneath the moss and roots, the way Ryuu had always been laid open to fire and sky.
But Luamis’ secrets were cowards. Buried deep until they sank to meet Deimos in hel.
The screaming stopped. And the silence, that terrible, honest thing, settled like dust.
Ronan leapt, a hundred feet down, the night wrapping him in a cloak as he fell. His wings stretched and braced, holding the wind as he descended quietly enough to go unheard. With his wings still wide, he landed in a crouch, body taut. Listening.
It wasn’t fear holding the forest anymore. It had become the unbothered quiet of night. He inhaled, searching for her, grimacing when the only thing that greeted him was death.
Thorns raked at his leathers as he pushed through the brush, roots splitting beneath his boots, vines snapping under his wings.
It didn’t take long to find them. Though, it wasn’t what he had expected.
The bodies weren’t torn apart, they were arranged, side by side, almost thoughtful. Almost remorseful.
The woman’s face was mottled grey, the same shade as Ryuu’s stone coves, two small puncture marks piercing her throat. Beside her, the child was worse. Blood seeped, sluggish and thick, from the wound, clinging like tar, the last of her life wrung out drop by drop.
She hadn’t just killed them. She had drained them.
This wasn’t only hunger; it had become survival. Not guilt as he had so hoped, but an unrelenting urge. Feeding so her own cursed life might endure.
His lashes lowered, a finger drifting, closing their clouded blue eyes. Black flame woke as his palms hovered against their foreheads, but he couldn’t summon it. Couldn’t burn them down and let them return to the core.
They weren’t deer or carrion beasts. They had homes and families who would search, who would wonder. Who deserved the certainty of death, rather than the endless cruelty of absence.
He gathered them instead, lifting them onto his shoulders. Mortal bodies were so fragile, so easily broken. Too delicate to even sift without disintegrating into nothing.
Which is why she hunted them. Fae fought. Mortals only ran.
The forest thickened as he moved, shapes bending, howls following his stride. More monsters, scenting what they thought to be weakness.
He didn’t take the bodies home, but he carried them closer, out of the forest, toward the village edge. Close enough that those who loved them might find them. Might have the closure he was never granted.
He stopped at a break in the trees, far from the town but exposed enough where they would be found as soon as day broke. Instinctively, he traced a rune in the dirt, then swiftly wiped it away before he could finish.
They wouldn’t reach the Aureveil, not by the old laws. Mortals were forbidden.
“For your suffering,” he whispered anyway. “May they lead you home.”
He prayed they would. Because one day, when his own tether snapped, when the darkness finally claimed him, he didn’t want stone. He wanted forgiveness. A place where breath didn’t taste of ash and legacy.
But for now, he would follow death’s footprints until they led him to her.
“Ronan—” The witch queen’s voice wrapped around him like spider gloss—smooth and cloying, meant to bind.
“Isolde.” His reply slipped, unbothered, save for the slick fire twisted beneath.
He crossed the arches of her fortress, where spires of black ice jutted overhead, spears poised to devour.
The air reeked of rot and frostbite. Decay was fused to the cloaks of her coven, their figures lurking between stone pillars, their gazes raking over him as though they could already taste his bones.
Still, Ronan entered like a storm tide.
“That’s queen to you,” Isolde spat, not bothering to grant him her eyes.
Above her, sickly light wavered, casting ecru shadows across her flesh-ripping fangs.
She turned, cradling an ivory skull in both hands, lifting it toward the glow.
Polished bone gleamed dully, a grotesque relic.
Her deep black hair fell in a sheet to her narrow waist, skin pulled too tight over brittle bones.
Her eyes, dark, sunken, so very empty, gawked at the skull with ravenous worship.
Her face was a contradiction. Youth stretched taut across a soul that wanted to wither. The lines of beauty were still there, high cheekbones, a mouth that might have one time curved sweetly.
Once, maybe, there had been more. There were stories of it, before the Gods drained the witches dry, ripping the magic from their veins. Before cruelty calcified what allure had lived in their faces.
But now, they were husks. Left to spoil.
Gold flared faintly in the green of his eyes before it receded. “You’ll hear me named king long before I ever call you queen.”
Her crooning stilled as agonized moans echoed from below, the sound scraping against the cave’s walls.
Smoke leaked from Ronan’s shoulders, moving across the ground until it hovered at her feet. She smiled at it, welcomed it, as if corruption itself were kin.
The skull in her hands was placed carefully back atop its chained rack, among its bone-white counterparts. A full victim, then.
The coven slithered at the edges of the chamber, their whispers growing—
“He is delicious.”
“Just a taste, my queen?”
“We won’t harm him, much too pretty for that.”
Their laughter rattled like madness. One look from Isolde, and they recoiled, cloaks snapping, heads bowed, retreating like beaten mutts.
Her gown flowed heavily behind her as she crossed to the cathedra, spun from the void itself. The throne she threw herself onto was made from pale bones—ribcages and femurs woven together like ivory wire.
“What is it you want?” she asked, studying something dried beneath her nails. “I am rather busy.”
Ronan stepped closer, enough to be certain that she heard. “I’m here to see why the forest’s scent has been different as of late.” She tilted a thin brow and he rolled his eyes. “I followed that rot, and imagine my surprise when it led me to you.”
She licked along her top fangs, blood welling on her tongue as her glare unfocused into a look close to desire. She rose from her throne in a glide, murk trailing at her back as she approached, cold fingers catching his hand.
His eyes gave nothing away, not a trace of the disgust curdling low in his gut. They matched the want in hers instead, the lust he could smell rolling off her, tangled with the death always pulsing from her skin.
He would let her think he hungered, though, let her think he could be tamed. That he came here for pleasure, and not for power.
Isolde lifted his hand slowly, dragging his finger along the curve of her chin, smearing the ribbon of blood spilling from her mouth. She painted him in it, coating every knuckle, every ridge, until his skin shone red.
Then she brought it to his mouth. “Suck,” she hissed, shoving his own finger past his lips.
He didn’t shy away, he tasted her, her truth forcing its slicked secrets against his tongue. The blood was like dirt after a fire, simple and warm, mixed with something sharp and acrid.
She wanted him to swallow it, the onyx in her eyes ignited at the thought, a wicked blaze swimming in their pits.
And if she thought he was hers, then she had already lost.
It collected in his mouth, before he spat it out, a crimson arc catching the light before spraying the stoned ground.
She smiled, practiced. “Imagine us, my darling.” The back of her hand swept down his cheek, pausing at the scar etched into the corner of his mouth.
“Queen of the witches. King of the dragons. How they’d marvel.
” A nail pressed into the scar until fresh blood welled, his own blood dripping into his mouth like a twisted intimacy. “And fear.”
Ronan only gave a sharp tilt of lips as he wiped them with the back of his hand. The scar she’d hoped to mar remained unchanged.
Movement unfurled from behind her throne, a dark, formless cloud creeping toward his steel boot. When it was close enough, his heel came down, the ground rattling with the stomp. The thing shrieked, hissed, twitching back into the murk.
Isolde’s laugh cut sharp, confused, while she wound her arm through his.
The tales weren’t just rumors, that Isolde kept a beast from hel itself, a gift from Deimos in exchange for her deadened heart.
Terror was always her true craving. Power, her obsession. She would devour both if she could, as if they were infinite. Glut on them like wine until they leaked from her pores.