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Orin

The second her ashes scatter, I feel it—that violent, visceral snap like bone fracturing inside my chest. The bond rips loose, not like silk slipping free, but like barbed wire tearing itself from the marrow of me.

Branwen is gone.

And all that's left is the wreckage she’s made of me.

My knees buckle. The ground surges up far too fast to stop it, my body folding beneath the weight of what’s no longer there—her pull, her voice inside my head, the endless gnawing hunger she left in me like a wound that wouldn’t heal.

It’s not peace I feel. It’s emptiness.

I collapse gracelessly, my vision fracturing, breath shallow as the poison I’d been feeding her coils now in my own veins, the venom of centuries seeping into muscle and bone. I let it. I always knew I would pay for what I did to her—what I let her do to me.

But I wasn’t expecting this.

I wasn’t expecting Silas fucking Veyd to drop onto me like a sack of chaos and limbs and bad ideas, followed by a dozen more versions of himself, all talking at once.

"Whoa there, big guy—easy, easy," one clone says, patting my cheek like I’m about to pass out drunk.

"Is it nap time? I love nap time," another one pipes up, upside down, grinning like a lunatic.

"Did you just die a little? Because same," a third says, poking my shoulder repeatedly like I’m a corpse he’s trying to resurrect.

The weight of all of them is ridiculous—too warm, too loud, too much—and I try to shove them off, my hand sluggish, fingers barely curling.

"Silas," I croak, voice like gravel dragged over broken glass.

All of them answer.

"Yes?"

"Present."

"At your service."

"Gods, get off me," I grit out, trying to breathe around the noise and limbs.

One of them—maybe the real one, maybe not—leans in closer, his stupid, chaotic grin softer around the edges. "You’re alive, Orin," he murmurs, quieter now, almost gentle. "You’re free."

The words hit me harder than the poison.

Because they’re true.

For the first time in weeks, there’s no chain around my throat, no voice in my head whispering how I’m not enough unless I destroy myself for her. The bond is gone. And all that's left is me—raw, unsteady, and bleeding from wounds no one can see.

"She’s really dead?" I manage, the question sticking in my throat like ash.

Silas nods, eyes suddenly sharp beneath the chaos. "Caspian gutted her like the rotting bitch she was. Ambrose made sure she didn’t leave a single speck behind."

The clones start to dissolve, one by one, like smoke curling into nothing.

And through the haze of pain, I hear footsteps—real ones—soft, careful, deliberate.

Lucien.

I lift my gaze, finding him at the edge of the wreckage, his mouth parted like he’s forgotten how to breathe, staring at me like he’s seeing me for the first time in centuries.

The chains are gone from him, too. His bond shattered the moment she died. I want to speak, to tell him he’s free—but I can’t. The poison still gnaws at me, eating me alive from the inside out.