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I ran for the throne room door, but no matter how hard I pulled on the iron handles I couldn’t make them budge. Wake up, wakeup,WAKE UP!I bit my lip hard, hard enough to draw blood if I weren’t asleep, and the pain brought me back into sharp focus.

The dream began to fade around the edges.

“I simply want you to know that I look forward to our reunion. A little Stormshade who can’t even control her own magic never stood a chance against me. And that prophecy?” Donika threw her head back and laughed, the whites of her teeth startling me.

She had fangs.

Was she… was she Noctani too?

Had she turned herself into a siphoning monster on top of all the other misdeeds she was guilty of?

“That prophecy can go fuck itself. In no realm could you ever best me. Istmere is mine, and you will never take it from me.”

The dream was fading faster now, and I could see on Corian’s face he knew he would lose me at any moment. He turned towards Donika, whispering something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Nikolai will never—”

But her words were cut off sharply as I was plunged into the light. I was slumped against the wall of a small room. No… not a room.

A cell.

I had promised myself I would never be a prisoner again and my anger and vengeance swelled within me. There was nowhere for it to go, and I had the distinct impression I would implode from the pressure. This wasn’t the Stormvault, but it must have been made from ash and iron all the same. It suppressed my magic.

I approached the bars of the cell, peering down the corridor. It wasn’t nearly as large or vast as the Stormvault was,and with no windows, I could only assume we were somewhere underground. There was a Noctani guard standing at the end of the hall, but I didn’t recognize them. Nikolai had knocked me out and taken me prisoner… but he hadn’t taken me back to Donika.

Not yet, at least.

I pulled on the bars with all my strength, but I wasn’t able to budge them. My shoulder stung with a sharp pain and I remembered that it had been pulled out of its socket. Someone had to have pushed it back in while I slept, as it was merely sore now. I wasn’t sure what time of day it was—or when I had been knocked out—but I prayed that I was the only one they had taken. That Tess and Puck had made it away safely. Nikolai had said that he only meant to capture me… would he have knocked them out but still let them go? Or would he have killed them?

If it was the former, I hoped they had the sense to go straight back to Alastir and Phineas to finish the antidote. That was the most important thing right now. Especially if Nikolai planned to steal my magic and turn me into a mortal. They had the Dragon’s breath—it was the final piece to create the antidote for Nik and Isaac.

Isaac.

Seeing him in the dream… mindless and empty… brought a physical pain to my chest. We needed to save him. He had taught me so much about my magic, there was no way I could ever repay him. He was more than merely a mentor to me. He was family.

But something nagged at the back of my mind about the difference between Nikolai and Isaac. During my dream walking, Isaac appeared to be completely under Donika’s control, with no thoughts of his own. Nikolai appeared… sentient in a way. He remembered me, remembered that he used to call meFirecracker. Did the bond between us have something to do with the difference between them? I hadn’t met enough Noctani to be sure, but something about Nikolai on that field in Prins was… different from what I imagined. He wasn’t himself—that much was clear—but he also wasn’t as… bloodthirsty, as I had been expecting.

I ran a dirt caked hand down my face and before I placed it back onto the bars before me, I noticed it had come away bloody. I brought my fingers to my bottom lip, and sure enough, it was split open. A slow drip of blood was running down my chin. I had bit my lip in the dream to try to wake myself, but it appeared I had bitten my lip in reality too.

As my surroundings became apparent to me, so did the soreness in my body. Not only was my shoulder sore, but I must have a black eye as well with how painfully it throbbed. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was covered head to toe in bruises from having the shit kicked out of me on the training field. They had tried to subdue me without truly killing me, and they had succeeded.

But Nikolai… he had slammed the sword into my head.

He hadhurtme.

My breath caught in the back of my throat as I sank to the floor, curling my knees into my chest. The movement musthave made enough sound to draw the attention of the guard at the end of the hall, because a voice rang out.

“She wakes! Master, she wakes!”

Master?Was that what Nikolai was now, master of the Noctani?

I was instantly sick, my stomach roiling at the thought. Nausea rose in my gut, turning my mouth dry. I wrapped my arms around my knees and buried my face between them. What a fucking nightmare this had all devolved into.

I could hear a door opening and closing, the sound of heavy boots against the concrete floor.

The approaching figure held a lantern in his hand, the light searing through the back of my closed eyelids. I made the mistake of glancing up and instantly regretted it. I scurried to the back of the cell to put as much distance between us as possible.

Those endless, tourmaline eyes were the source of my every nightmare recently. They had once been a glimmering, glacial blue. No matter how many times I saw what Nikolai looked like now, I would never get used to it.