Page 174

She’s counting on them. On the way their bonds to her have carved them hollow. On the way she’s made them hers. But what she doesn’t understand is that the thing she built inside me—the thing I shattered—is still sharp and jagged in my hands.

"You’re wrong," I tell her, stepping forward now, pulse rattling in my throat.

She lifts a brow, almost amused. "Am I?"

"You don’t get to keep them." I flick a glance at Orin, at Lucien, who still hasn’t met my eyes. "You don’t get to keep any of us."

Her gaze slides back to me like a caress and a curse. "I already do."

Riven’s voice cuts low beside me. "Not for long."

Branwen’s smile is razored, her spine straightening as she looks past us, back at the pillar, and I see the moment she realizes we know.

The moment she realizes we’re not here to kill her.

We’re here to end her.

Elias

I never liked this bitch. Not the first time she slithered out of the darkness, draped in grief like it made her interesting. Not the second, when she dressed her venom in soft words and promises she never meant to keep. And sure as hell not now, when she’s perched on that throne like a queen of corpses, her smile hollow and her eyes dead.

Branwen always talked like she was chosen. Like the gods reached down and plucked her from the gutter and handed her to us. A gift.

She wasn’t a gift.

She’s the rot beneath the foundation. A leech that latched on when we were still bleeding from what we lost, too fucking arrogant to see she was chewing through the bone.

And now she’s here, holding Lucien and Orin like puppets, their strings wound tight around her fingers, and I can feel it—how much of them is missing. How much she’s carved out to keep herself alive.

The cathedral smells like dust and death and the sharp bite of magic that’s rotted too long in one place. It’s not a place for the living, but we’ve always been half-dead anyway. The pillars hum behind her like a heartbeat, and I know, the way I always know, that if I slow time now, even for a second, Orin will see it.

He’ll feel it. And he’ll drain me dry, with that quiet, sad look in his eyes like he’s sorry for it.

That’s what Branwen does. She makes you bleed yourself for her.

So I keep still.

I grind my molars and dig my nails into my palms, watching, calculating, because that’s all I can do right now. Riven’s practically vibrating beside me, Silas is rocking on the balls of his feet like he’s two seconds from throwing himself at her throne and daring her to tear him apart.

And Luna—

Fuck.

I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, the way I always do when I’m pretending not to. She’s too calm. Too still. Like she’s waiting to burn this place down.

And I want her to. I want her to take this entire cathedral and raze it to ash and salt the earth, and I want to watch her do it.

But I can’t give her that opening yet. Because Orin’s veins are still pulsing in rhythm with that damn pillar and Lucien is watching us like a man trapped behind glass, and Branwen—

Branwen is smiling at me.

Like she knows.

“Still brooding, Elias?” she purrs, voice sticky sweet, dripping with condescension. “You always did wear your misery well.”

I tilt my head, roll my shoulders like I’m bored out of my mind, even as my fingers twitch. "You talk too much, Branwen. It’s why no one ever wanted to fuck you."

Her smile slips for a fraction of a second, and I savor it.