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My gaze shot to Attes. Only one dagger remained strapped to his body. He’d thrown that blade.

Why?

“Damn it.” Callum stumbled and then hit the gold-streaked floor. Dead. But I didn’t think he’d stay that way. However, I couldn’t remember why at the moment.

I couldn’t…

My chest spasmed. Shadows descended over my sight like a veil. Icy panic seized me as I fell into darkness, the brief moments of relief dissipating. No sound. No scent. No sight.

I didn’t want to die.

Not now.

I didn’t—

Liessa…

I jolted, hauled from the darkness. Images of what I saw pieced themselves together: the golden divan I’d been asleep on, the chain connected to the band I barely felt around my neck, the golden bars of the cage I was in, and the shadowstone dagger that had been in Callum’s chest, which now lay on the floor. The Revenant was rising, standing. How long had I been unconscious? I looked past him, beyond the golden throne, and farther out to the open doors.

I saw the wolf again, this time partially hidden by the wide palm fronds swaying in the balmy breeze.

My right hand—no, the marriage imprint that had appeared during my coronation as Ash’s Consort—warmed. The golden swirl across the top and palm tingled, and the embers of life in my chest started to hum, vibrating wildly. A sharp swirl of prickles broke out along the nape of my neck.

Kolis continued to rock as I sensed a storm of gathering power. My skin pimpled, and the tiny hairs on my body rose.

Attes turned to the doors. “Oh, fuck.”

The wolf’s head lowered, its eyes a luminous silver. One large paw pressed against the gold-streaked marble floor, his lips peeling back in a snarl.

A dark mist came from everywhere all at once. Shadows clung to the chamber ceiling where the chandelier’s light didn’t reach, then began pulsing and peeling away from the marble and limestone, slipping down the walls to race across the floor in smoky waves. My already too-shallow breaths snagged as the wolf leapt into the air and the churning mass of darkness. Tiny starbursts exploded all around him, and the center of my chest warmed—

The whirling shadows by the doors expanded and lengthened. Twin, sweeping arcs of shadow and smoke appeared behind the mass, and a shockwave swept through the chamber, making its way to the throne. The golden seat shuddered and then crumbled into nothing. The burst of power reached Attes, tossing him aside before lifting Callum, slamming him into the cage with a sickening crunch of bone.

Several rows of bars shattered. The chamber ceiling cracked and splintered, splitting open. The shadows and smoke solidified in the bright moonlight now pouring into the chamber.

The walls around us exploded, sending chunks of stone flying outward, leaving only a few feet of the structure standing as Ash rose even higher.

For the briefest moment, I saw him in his mortal form, the angles and planes of his face harsh and maybe even a little cruel, his skin a lustrous shade of golden-bronze, his hair reddish-brown in the moonlight falling against his broad cheeks. I caught just a flash of his strong, cut jaw, wide mouth, and full lips that had touched my skin in such decadent ways.

Then he slipped into his true form and hovered above where the throne had been, his flesh becoming a continuous swirl of midnight and thin, throbbing streaks of eather. The fresh, citrusy scent that was all his reached me, comforted me.

Ash was terrifying, his beauty vicious and breathtaking in both forms. And he was mine.

“Kolis!” Ash roared, his voice a thunderstorm reverberating through the air.

Without warning, a burst of light cut through the night sky, slamming into the floor before Ash as heat flared in my chest. The funnel of light burned brightly, momentarily blinding me. When my vision returned, I saw…

A crown of ruby antlers gleaming in the moonlight.

Another Primal had arrived.

Hanan, the dark-haired, pale, and angular-featured Primal God of the Hunt and Divine Justice, stood before Ash. He held a spear made of some sort of dull white material that reminded me of bone in his right hand.

“Walk away, Nyktos.” Hanan’s spear began glowing from within. “Before it’s too late,” he warned. But I heard the tremor in the Primal’s voice, he who’d sent the Cimmerian to retrieve Bele instead of coming to the Shadowlands himself. I heard the fear.

Hanan may be a Primal, but he was also a coward.

“Before it’s too late?” Ash’s voice boomed, the power of it leveling what remained of the chamber walls. “It’s already too late.”