Page 119 of Brutal Crown

He’s at her side in seconds, catching her before she crumples completely. His hands hold her firmly as he cradles her in his arms. He exhales a relieved breath as she looks up at him.

On her knees before him.

Something rips through me. A soundless, brutal tearing.

The chanting stops. The entire room holds its breath.

The rite is done. She chose him. She walked through hell for him. All that is left is to say the words, to claim him in the presence of the oracle of the Society.

And I don’t think I can wait to hear it.

My body turns before I make the choice. My feet move before I can fully register it. I force my trembling hands into my pockets as I push the door open behind me and slip into the hall.

I bite down so hard on my tongue, I taste blood. My eyes blur, and everything in the hallway seems to be spinning.

I was wrong about everything. Wrong to think we still had something. Wrong to think I mattered at all.

I want to believe I was just a mistake she made—a slip in a moment of loneliness. A body to warm her before she accepted the life that’s always been waiting for her.

Maybe that’s all I ever was. A breath between choices. She’s going to choose him. She always was. Even when she let me touch her.

Even last night, when she looked at me like maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t a monster. When we talked to each other in the quiet, under the candlelight of my study.

But if she wasn’t going to choose him, then why walk? Why bleed for a ritual designed to shatter her, only to reject the match at the end?

She wouldn’t. No one would. And that’s what guts me. Not that she’s choosing survival. But that survival doesn’t include me.

But some desperate, pathetic part of me still wants to believe this isn’t over. That what we had, that charged, broken, beautiful thing between us wasn’t just a fever dream we both woke up from.

It felt real. It was real. I know it.

You don’t look at someone the way she looked at me and just forget.

But reality doesn’t give a fuck about feelings. And the truth is that it’s over for us. Maybe it was always going to end like this. Maybe I was the one deluded enough to think it wouldn’t.

The image burns behind my eyes—knees raw, smoke curling around her frame, her eyes fixed on him while he held her—sears itself into the back of my skull as I walk down the corridor. Her body wrecked and shaking.

But not for me. For him.

She made her choice. And whether I respect it or not… it doesn’t change a damn thing.

31

LIA

Afew hours earlier

They saythe fire is sacred. That it blesses the soul before it’s claimed—but that’s a lie.

This isn’t some sacred rite of passage. It’s not about faith or honor or even love. It’s about control.Erasure.

No one walks the fire unless they’re an outsider with something the Society wants. Not just anyone is allowed to be made whole again.

You have to be useful. Dangerous. Pregnant with prophecy, maybe. You have to be a problem they can’t kill outright. Like me.

This ritual was never meant for people like me. I wasn’t born for their bloodlines, their legacy. I wasn’t bred for power or raised for obedience. But I carry something they want. So now, they make an exception.

They give you the illusion of choice. That’s all it is—illusion. Walk or die. Bleed or vanish. Become his—or become nothing.