Page 111 of Academy of the Wicked: Year Three

She stands before me in the darkness, and every cell in my ancient body screams with recognition that something has fundamentally changed.

Dragon.

The scent clings to her like a second skin—smoke and metal and power that doesn't belong to her, couldn't belong to her, because she'smine. The luminescence of her flesh carries new undertones, blood that runs hotter, magic that tastes of scales and centuries and scholarlypatience.

Mortimer.

The name burns through my consciousness like acid, jealousy igniting in ways I haven't felt since my first decades as a vampire, when control was suggestion rather than practice. My blood boils—literally, the vampire vitae in my veins heating to temperatures that should be impossible for my kind.

She let him touch her. Mark her.Changeher.

"You smell different," I tell her, and my voice comes from everywhere in this space that exists between nightmare and desire. "Like you've been claimed by someone else."

The dozens of versions of myself that exist in this trial—each one representing different century, different hunger, differentfailure to maintain control—all turn their red eyes toward her. We see it simultaneously: the way she stands straighter, the confidence that comes from being recently fed, recentlysatisfiedby someone who isn't us.

The betrayal of it makes my fangs extend fully, cutting into my own lips until copper fills my mouth.

My insecurities scream their truths into the darkness:

Too weak. Too kind. Too willing to share when you should have claimed.

I've been foolish, letting her maintain connections with others, pretending that modern sensibilities matter more than vampire law. She's my Queen—not metaphorically but literally, the one I've chosen to serve, to worship, to possess and be possessed by.

But worship and possession are two sides of the same blade, and I've been cutting myself on the wrong edge.

"You're mine," I tell her, and all my voices harmonize into something that makes the darkness itself shiver. "My possession. My territory. My domain."

She takes a defensive stance, and even that makes me rage—that she would need defense against me, that she doesn't simply submit to the truth we both know.

"Atticus," she says carefully, "this isn't you. This is the trial?—"

"The trial shows truth," I interrupt, moving closer through dimensions that fold around my will. "And the truth is, I've watched you die."

The illusion shifts, showing her what I've been experiencing in this personalized hell:

Gwenievere falling in the water trials, my hands not fast enough to catch her.

Gwenievere burning in dragon fire, Mortimer's power consuming her from within.

Gwenievere choosing Cassius's shadows over my blood.

Gwenievere aging while I remain eternal, her human lifetime a blink I'll have to survive without.

Gwenievere torn apart by Academy trials I couldn't protect her from.

Gwenievere, Gwenievere, Gwenievere—dead, gone, lost in every possible future.

"Again and again," I tell her, surrounding her with versions of myself that have each witnessed different ending. "Every instance, every possibility, I lose you. I'm left alone with no purpose except the memory of what I failed to keep."

The weight of centuries spent alone before her, the certainty of centuries alone after her—it crushes rational thought into powder.

"So now that you're here," I continue, and my voice drops to something beyond predatory, "I can't possibly let you leave."

I raise my wrists to my own fangs, tearing through skin with practiced precision. Blood doesn't just flow—iterupts, responding to my will rather than gravity. The crimson shapes itself into threads, thousands of them, each one stronger than steel despite being liquid.

"Atticus, don't?—"

Too late.