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Eve

My breath stalled.

I couldn't look away.

I couldn't blink.

Because I knew, if I did, I'd never be able to pretend again. Not even for a second.

His smile didn't reach his eyes—but it didn't have to.

The cruelty was in his voice now. Slow. Measured. Absolute.

"I've run the numbers," he said. "Factored in resource expenditure, war fatigue, attrition rates. We've lost more to werewolf alliances and uprisings than to any other external force in the past three decades."

He stepped forward, and it felt like the temperature dropped.

"I won't keep negotiating with parasites. I won't offer peace treaties to mutts who understand only blood. I won't waste another soldier, another child, another breath, trying to make room for the very species that has tried to erase mine from the beginning."

I shook my head. "No… no, this isn't you—"

"Don't delude yourself, Eve," he snapped, eyes flashing. "This is the only version of me that ever made sense."

He circled me slowly, like a predator explaining to its prey why it must die.

"When the Bloodmoon ends, the weaklings will die out on their own. But the survivors? The alphas? The ones with magic still clinging to their bones?"

He leaned closer, voice chilling.

"I'll find them. I'll drag them out from their burrows, their caves, their last desperate strongholds—and I'll burn them. I'll harvest every last one of your kind until there's nothing left but ash in my archives."

My entire body trembled.

Not just with horror.

But grief.

A grief so large it didn't even feel real. It was a wicked void suckinb away any minute hope that I wanted to cling to. Leaving me in a free fall that would end in no where other that my long anticipated demise.

"Hades…"

He didn't flinch. He didn't blink. He wasn't listening.

He was preaching.

"You want to know what the worst part is?" he whispered, his breath cool against my skin. "Your people... your kind... they had the chance to evolve. They were offered mercy. Over and over. And every single time, they pissed on it. So now?"

He straightened, his silhouette a jagged shadow against the sterile light.

"Now, I give them what they gave us. War. Slaughter. Extinction."

I whimpered. The sound felt foreign in my throat. Like I was no longer made of the same matter that once loved him.

"You're talking about genocide," I whispered. "You're talking about exterminating an entire race."

"I'm talking about preservation," he corrected, calm now. Too calm. "No more conscriptions. No more forced pacts. No more pretending we're equals in a world where your kind has always been the poison."

His voice dipped, low and seething.

"You were born from blood and lies. You bred mutiny and treason like it was scripture. And every time a Lycan died for a werewolf cause, you must have called it balance."

He stepped forward again.

"That balance ends with me."

I couldn't speak.

My throat was an open wound. My chest refused to rise. The tears came, but they were silent now—like something inside me had shattered too deeply to scream.

"You're one of the last," he added almost gently. "Isn't that poetic? The cursed twin… the monster they tried to lock away… ends up being the final harvest."

He crouched again, leveled his eyes with mine.

"Your blood will save my kind," he murmured, voice wrapped in finality. "And your death will avenge them."

I stared at him.

And for the first time since this nightmare began, I didn't see Hades.

I didn't even see the man I hated.

I saw nothing.

A void shaped like someone I used to love.

A god in a man's skin, fueled by loss and poisoned by power.

I felt the last pieces of myself collapsing inward. The girl who loved him. The girl who hoped.

Gone.

Ash.

I whispered, barely audible:

"You were trying to finish what they started."

His eyes met mine—flat. Cold.

"No," he said.

"I'm trying to finish what I started."

He took a breath.

And for a second—just a second—I saw it.

A flicker.

The briefest tremor in the pitiless void of his expression.

"If things had been different," he murmured, voice scraping against something fragile in his throat, "I was going to make you my queen."

His gaze didn't soften—but it fractured.

Pain, ache, heartbreak that could have mirrored mine.

"I thought… if I made you Luna… I'd have a handle on the chaos. I'd own it. I'd own you."

He looked away, his jaw clenched so tightly I could hear his teeth grind.

"I was going to love you in the open. Protect you. Pretend it was all fate. Because if I made you mine, it'd be easier to ignore the truth of what you were. Of what you'd done. Of what you'd become."

My breath caught. My throat tightened.

"But that luxury," he said, the glimmer in his eyes already dying, "was buried the moment I learned the truth. The memory card. The lab results. The massacre. The lies."

He looked at me again.

The crack was gone.

Only stone remained.

"You're not my Luna, Eve. You're not even a woman anymore. You're a weapon. One that I'm going to use until the very last drop."

The decay in his voice sharpened—like something inside him had uncoiled. I felt it in the air. In the tremor under my skin. The flux was stirring. Crawling. Invading.

"You'll be extracted in intervals. No sedation. No reprieve. You'll fight in the front lines as my cursed banner until the blood moon rises—eighteen months from now."

I choked. "You can't—"

"I can," he growled, low and dark. "And I will. After that?"

He smiled again. That same broken, empty smile that made my stomach turn.

"You'll watch your kind burn. Every last one. No courts. No diplomacy. No mercy. Just fire."

My soul screamed.

But my body—shackled, numb—couldn't follow.

I wanted to die. End it all