Page 305

Hades

It felt like fire and ice were battling for dominion beneath my skin as I took my seat again.

Not burning—but splitting. As if my soul were a fault line and the Flux was the earthquake tearing through it.

Thoughts fractured. Bones screamed. I could feel it trying to rewrite me—erase the person and carve in the monster. Memories blurred, truth buckled, and somewhere in the chaos, her name was the only tether left keeping me from sinking into the void.

Every nerve flared. Every breath tasted like iron and ash. It wasn't pain—it was violation. A war on the self.

The Flux didn't just invade. It desired. To take. To own. To twist every grief, every fear, every buried betrayal into rage and hunger. And worst of all—it used my own love to do it.

Because it whispered in her voice now.

It whispered of centuries lost. Of vengeance owed. Of children torn from cradles.

And I—

I wasn't sure if I was fighting it anymore.

Or just screaming inside the cage it had made of me.

Even now, as I tried to honor Eve's rightful choice to be separated from me, it waged a war against me. I was no longer ignoring it, or simply living side by side with this entity—I was fighting it.

The meeting proceeded. Chairs shifted away from mine as I battled the Flux internally. With each second that passed, the war within me grew more precarious.

I glanced down at the hand that Eve had touched. Despite everything—despite all my sins, my atrocities—that woman still cared. Even as she asked for a divorce, she still reached out to me. To save me from myself.

"You can't let her go. I can't let her go." The Flux raged from within.

"There are consequences. You called her a mutt. I let you force my hand. We destroyed the only person who could love us—monstrosity and all. We did this," I growled back. I glanced at her—her short hair framing her small face. "We've lost her. The least we can do… is to let her go."

The reply was instant—hitting me like a thunderbolt that made my bones crack beneath my own skin.

"Then die," the Flux hissed.

My spine arched as if an invisible hook yanked me upward from the ribs. My lungs seized. My jaw clenched so tightly I tasted blood.

"Letting her go is death."

The voice wasn't in my ears anymore.

It was in my marrow.

In the deepest corners of my mind.

Not screaming. No—not yet.

It didn't have to.

It was peeling me apart with a whisper.

I gripped the edge of the obsidian table, knuckles white, veins bulging against my skin as heat rippled beneath my flesh like molten glass trying to burst free. The council watched with sharpened stillness, like men deciding whether to flee or kill. None of them spoke. None dared.

They saw it now.

This wasn't an Alpha breaking down.

This was a god splitting open.

My corrupted eye pulsed beneath the skin of my palm. I could feel it trying to look—to find her. To anchor to her the only way it knew how: through possession.

But I kept my palm clamped.

She had asked for freedom.

And I—no matter how fractured I was—still loved her.

Even now.

Especially now.

"You want vengeance," I whispered in my head, jaw trembling, fighting the urge to scream aloud. "But I want peace. I want what she wants."

The Flux snarled. "Peace is what killed us last time. Peace is what let them burn our name from stone. Peace is what watched our child bleed out on a marble floor."

The scene sliced through my thoughts like a heated blade. Agony engulfed me. A strange grief overtook me.

The pain in my chest splintered something vital. I staggered in my seat, unable to breathe.

Across the chamber, Eve watched me—one hand pressed to her heart like it physically hurt to look at me.

It should.

I had done this.

I had ruined everything sacred.

And now I was being asked to do the hardest thing of all:

Let her go.

Let her walk away while the part of me that still remembered the taste of her skin, the weight of her laughter, the hope in her eyes… begged me not to.

Begged me to fight.

But I was fighting.

Fighting not to reach for her.

Fighting not to force the world to kneel until she loved me again.

Fighting to be a man—

The man she loved.

When the monster in me would have burned it all down just to keep her one more day.

My hand slowly unclenched.

The blood beneath it had dried to pitch-black crust.

The eye was closed now.

The beast was not gone.

But it had been denied.

For now.

And as I lifted my head, I met Eve's gaze.

Not with a plea.

Not with a claim.

But with a broken truth:

"I'm still in here. Let's continue this meeting."

And gods help me, I would stay in here—

"Are you sure, Your Majesty?" Montegue asked, his voice colored with worry.

I ground my teeth until I heard one crack. "Yes. Let's continue. This meeting shall not be adjourned."

They all gave wary glances before Silas cleared his throat.

"You say you've agreed to the Fenrir's Chain Rite, Your Majesty?"

Even as I nodded, it was like a weight sat on my neck. "Yes. I agree. She has reason to believe she will be betrayed by this council. So it is my duty as Alpha to bind myself to our greatest salvation—as well as our reckoning."

Gallinti was not at all convinced, so Montegue spoke up.

"See it as this—she, as much as we cannot be a threat to her, she cannot be a threat to us. See it as a sword held to all our throats."

Kael adjusted his shirt, clearing his throat, though he remained pale.

"She wants to save our people as much as we want to save ours. It's only fair. It's her blood."

They were not about to counter that.

"Whatever you say," Silas grumbled, crossing his arms, glancing furtively at Eve—but I caught the action.

"Silas," my voice was a drawl that made the ambassador's eyes snap to mine. "You seem to have something to say."

He stared back like a deer in headlights as the room went silent. Again, he glanced at Eve. My gut twisted.

"Silas…" I ground out his name in warning.

His eyes darted around the table at everyone else sitting there as though expecting someone else to speak up.

"Are we really going to ignore the elephant in the room?" he finally said.

No one spoke, but what he meant was clear.

The ambassador turned crimson, his frustration rising.

"So you're all going to pretend you didn't hear our Alpha call her Elysia?"

Silence.

"The mother of all Lycans," Silas clarified—as if the weight of the name wasn't already enough.

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