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And Wilder Hawthorne.

Thea couldn’t breathe as she watched Wilder slice through the binds of a monster, freeing it, his handsome face a mask of cool calm.

This can’t be happening.Thea blinked rapidly, convinced that she was hallucinating, that the next time she opened her eyes, she would see something different.

But it was as plain as day before her.

All this time she had thought Vernich was the fallen Warsword.

But it wasn’t him letting the darkness in. There was no denying who had cut the bonds of the monsters before her.

It was Wilder.

Thea felt as if her chest was caving in. Wilder Hawthorne was in league with the Daughter of Darkness. With that realisation, all the other smaller pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The hawk from Naarva, where the Veil was weakest. Hiding his sources’ updates from her. Flinching when the others shot the half-wraith from the sky. Calling the monster on the clifftops of Thezmarr ‘he’ rather than ‘it’.

All this time he’d been aiding them. All this time he’d been lying.

She had been such a fool.

Vernich’s words echoed in her mind:‘He was the one to change tactics at the last moment. He was the one to tell Farissa to take the young alchemist with her… He created the fucking opening for them.’

Were she not seeing it with her own eyes, Thea wouldn’t have believed it, not after everything they had been through together.

He had told her that helovedher.

He had made her love him back.

And now… now he was with the enemy. Hewasthe enemy.

He had taken everything Thezmarr stood for, everything the Warswords fought for, and broken it so thoroughly it was no more than dust in the wind.

She expected anger, she expected violence, and she knew that would come. What she did not expect was the blow of grief that hit her in the chest, manifesting in waves of physical pain.

Someone had died.

The Wilder she knew was gone. Had he ever existed?

In the distance, an alarm bell sounded.

Thea grimaced, her grip around her bow tightening. The fucking castle fools may as well have just announced their arrival.

‘One of the guards must have escaped,’ the winged general said to Anya and Wilder. ‘We need to leave,now.’

Gone was Cal’s arrow in his chest. He moved as though he’d never been shot at all. Thea’s skin crawled as she wondered what evil shadow magic could seal a wound like that.

‘Dratos, you see to the injured,’ Anya told him, her voice full of command.

Dratos.

‘He often brings me word from a ranger in Naarva called Dratos…’The words Wilder had spoken were like a punch to the gut. He had been in on all of this since the very beginning.

Thea tasted the bitterness of bile rising up. She had been such a fool.

No more.

There was a flurry of movement as the monsters readied themselves, preparing to depart —

Thea pointed her arrow through the trees, straight at Anya’s heart. It didn’t matter who she might once have been. Anya was the Daughter of Darkness, the enemy who was poisoning the midrealms. No blood ties or storms would stop Thea now.