Page 45

I just smile.
“Oh, Sev,” I purr, syrupy and cruel. “You really should work on your projections.”
Severin should know better. He should know. I’m not Lucien, full of cold, calculated arrogance. I’m not Riven, a living embodiment of a blade, honed and vicious. I’m not Ambrose, who bleeds greed like a dragon coiled over his hoard.
I am envy, the thing that slithers beneath every other sin, feeding them, twisting them, making them ugly and insatiable. And unlike Severin, I don’t pretend I’m above it.
Which is why I laugh when he lifts his hand, shadows curling around his fingers like living ink, twisting in the air with a kind of careful, controlled precision that tells me.
He’s actually trying.
How cute.
"You think that's going to work?" I say, stretching my arms above my head, flexing my fingers. "After all this time, Sev? After everything?"
His lips curl back, feral, and the void itself shudders under his will.
The shadows explode forward, coiling and snapping like a hundred hungry maws, twisting toward me so fast the air distorts around them, a vacuum of power collapsing in on itself.
And I grin. Because I don’t need to dodge. I don’t need to block. I don’t need to do a damn thing.
Except take it.
Severin’s power surges into me, a relentless, all-consuming force meant to crush, to obliterate, to leave nothing in its wake. It slams into my chest like a battering ram,
And I devour it.
The envy in me howls, the thing that is both hunger and need and bottomless abyss, opening wide and drinking him down. The moment his magic touches me, I feel it warp, twisting into something else, something mine, something better.
Severin jerks back, eyes narrowing.
"That’s not- "
"Not fair?" I finish for him, flexing my fingers, feeling his power slither over my skin like an echo of him. "I don’t play fair, Sev. Never have, never will."
I throw his power back at him, amplified, distorted, dripping with my own brand of corruption.
And he feels it.
His longing twisted back against him. The need to take, to consume, to have everything and everyone bend to his will, except this time, the longing is mine.
For one sharp, blistering second, his control wavers. I see it in the way his breath catches. The way his stance shifts. The way his eyes flash, rage tangled with something darker.
I stalk forward, slow, deliberate, pushing him back with every lazy step.
"You still don’t get it, do you?" I say, tilting my head. "You and your little exiled freak show spent all these years obsessing over revenge. About getting back what was taken from you. But Sev…" I lean in, dropping my voice to a whisper.
"You can’t take what was never yours."
His shadows lash out again, desperate, angry, frantic, and I laugh, catching them in my hands like they're nothing more than smoke and wishes.