Page 282

Her shadows struck, winding around his ankles and wrists, holding him down as Juliette drew a dagger and Nuri bared her fangs.

“After all I did for you three,” he spat, another cough rattling from his chest.

Scarlett’s head tilted to the side as she studied him. Nothing but a powerless male before them now. “He is right,” she said. “We should be thanking him.” Her sisters met her gaze, darkness staring back at her. Her shadows wound up, tightening around his throat, and her lip curled as she peered down at him once more. “We are exactly as you trained us to be.”

“Ruthless,” Death Incarnate purred, her dagger coming down into his gut.

“Vindictive,” Death’s Shadow crooned, a scimitar slicing deeply across his chest.

“A weapon,” Death’s Maiden said, summoning starfire to her palm and bringing it to his mouth.

He thrashed beneath her shadows, his head jerking from side-to-side, trying to get away from the fire that would end his existence, leaving nothing for the After.

“You are the master of nothing anymore, Alaric,” Scarlett whispered into his ear. “Not a fellowship of assassins. Not a land of mortals. Not an army of seraphs. Not my sisters. Not me. You are not even the master of your own death. You are nothing. A prince without a throne. A failure. The game is over.” And as her hand slipped over his mouth, starfire seeping between his lips, down his throat, into every vein of his being, she said, “I won.”

She burned him from the inside out, and the three of them didn’t say a word as they watched white flames and pools of darkness devour. Scarlett knew the moment he was truly gone. She felt power slam against her soul. Felt a roar of rage and fury at being kept from this world yet again when whatever enchantment Alaric had put on the mirror gate failed.

Scarlett tunneled down into her Chaos, to the very core of it, to the essence that had created this world, and she locked the realm. No one in. No one out. Unless they came through her and her Prince of Fire.

When she opened her eyes, there was nothing but a pile of fine white ash on the floor. Scarlett lifted a hand, dropping the rose she still held atop it.

A rose with a black ribbon wrapped around a piece of paper containing a name.

The name of her final assignment as Death’s Maiden.

None of them looked away when she held out her hands to her sisters, Traveling them out of that underground passage.

Where they left the Wraiths of Death to die with the one who had created them.

* * *

They reappeared in the foyer of the Fiera Palace, and Sorin was dragging her into him a second later. She’d had to shut him out to stay focused, and now she breathed him in. Ashes. Cloves. Cedar. Him.

It was over.

It was over.

It was over.

Breathe, Love,came down the bond, a hand taking hers and guiding it to his chest. She could feel it steadily rising and falling beneath her fingers.

In and out.

In and out.

In and out.

She tried to match their breathing, but it wasn’t working. She hadn’t realized she’d started crying. Great sobs that wracked her body. It was over, but so much had been lost. They had won. The realm was saved, but the cost…

She clung to him, his arms tight around her. At some point, he’d lowered them to the floor. She couldn’t hear anything else around them. Sound was muffled, as though she were under water, and he was the only one who could pull her back to the surface.

Because they had won. It was over. But the world was not as bright as it once was. So many stars were gone from the sky. Lights she had known, and so many more she hadn’t. Finn. Sloan. Nakoa. Sawyer. Hazel. Callan.

Callan.

“Love,” Sorin said softly. “I need to show you.”

“I can’t, Sorin,” she managed between a sob. “I can’t right now. It is all too much.”