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Without another thought, I strode inside.

The silence was suffocating .

I followed the bond. The familiar pressure weighed heavily against my neck, like an invisible hand squeezing tighter with every move, sending my pulse racing, a drumbeat that echoed in my ears.

My heart pounded in my chest, each beat syncing with the growing tension, pushing me further into the heart of the palace, into whatever awaited me.

Soon—though the word had no meaning anymore, not when time dragged its feet like a funeral dirge—the hall yawned open to splintered doors barely hanging on their hinges. I stepped through, and the world ended.

An icy fist gripped my lungs. My tail stopped working. I stood there, useless, while everything inside me screamed.

There she was.

My woman. My siren.

My Queen.

Crushed against the stone floor, curled over a body that no longer breathed.

Her body trembled with each shallow breath, spine hunched as if it couldn’t bear the weight of what she’d lost. Of what she was still losing.

Blood smeared her hands, streaked down her arms like war paint, but she wasn’t a warrior here.

She was a girl undone. A child in mourning.

Her hands—gods, those hands that once reached for me with warmth—shook as they clutched the elderly siren’s lifeless form. The woman’s skin dimmed, gray, drained of its glow. I didn’t need to ask who she was. The grief told me.

And I just stood there. Watching.

My mind raced, snapping like a thread from a ripped fabric. Everything we’d been through—every flicker of pain, every wrench in my chest through the bond—it all flashed into place with surgical precision. This was it.

She wasn’t just suffering. She obliterated .

The water suffocated me—the simple act of breathing a burden. I couldn’t breathe.

I wanted to scream, to tear down the fucking walls, to crawl to her and gather her up in my arms, piece by piece, even if I had to bleed for it. But I remained frozen. No flame, no fury, just a jagged, gaping chasm inside of me carving out something vital.

She was everything.

And she was falling apart.

And I—

I broke with her.

I had always seen her as the steady one, the unshakable, emotionally guarded. But now, she was a mess of blood and agony, her heart splintering with every passing moment. And I couldn’t help her.

I couldn’t fuck help her.

My chest caved in on itself, sharp and suffocating. It hurt. Gods, it hurt. She was shattering right in front of me, and I was just standing here. Useless. Watching her break.

And I wasn’t here.

I let her go.

I could’ve stopped this if I had only left with her.

The guilt chewed through me like rot, savage and relentless. I hadn’t been there. Hadn’t protected her. Didn’t even know she needed me until it was too damn late. That truth clawed at my ribs, carved itself into my spine.

I wanted to run to her. Drag her into my arms and lie to her if I had to—tell her it would pass, that we’d be alright. But there was no lie strong enough to cover this kind of pain.

There was no “alright” anymore.

She wasn’t okay. And I couldn’t fix it.

So I reached for the bond.

Grief poured through it, thick and choking. I staggered under the weight of it, of her agony. It didn’t pulse—it crushed me. Her pain didn’t speak in words; it screamed in silence. I tasted ash, blood, endings.

She had lost everything.

I need to fix this.

I couldn’t give it back.

But I could take something. I could take .

The rage came quietly at first. A whisper beneath the weight. Then it built—feral, wild, and cold. Not the kind that burns hot and dies out. No, this was the kind that froze over your soul and made you carve names into vengeance with your bare hands.

Someone had done this.

Someone had torn her apart.

And they would bleed for it.

Every. Single. One. Of them.

They would learn that the man who’d walked into this hall moments ago was dead.

This was no longer just about us. This was about retribution.

A laugh cut through the grief like a blade dragged over raw nerves, sharp, mocking, and wrong.

My head snapped toward the sound, instinct and rage flaring before thought could catch up. It dragged me out of the gravity of Iryen’s collapse, if only for a moment, and anchored me in something colder. Meaner.

There he was.

The laugh belonged to a Triton I’d only seen through the fractured lens of her memories, faint flashes she tried to bury, but I’d seen enough. Heard enough.

His voice slithered through the room like poison. Cold. Ridiculing. Like he had nothing better to do than stand in the ruins of her grief and smile .

My eyes locked on him, and something deep inside me pulled taut, like a bowstring ready to snap.

He was young—my age, maybe younger—but there was a stillness in him I didn’t like. A predator’s calm. He thought he was safe. Like he believed none of this would touch him.

Curly blond hair, those glacial blue eyes, and that sickly pale skin that caught the light like bone. He looked like something that had crawled out of the deep and learned to smirk.

He was leaner than I, built like someone who knew how to slip a knife in just under the ribs—and enjoy it. His stance reeked of confidence, but not the earned kind. This was the smug, hollow kind. The kind that came from never being punished hard enough.

My muscles coiled. Breath shallow. Wrath thick in my throat.

He was the fucking ex.

He had touched her.

He had the audacity to breathe the same air while she bled on the floor.

A cold, electric fury lit my veins, sharp enough to drown out grief. It crackled under my skin, begging for release. I didn’t move, not yet, but every cell in my body screamed to lunge, to tear, to end him.

He smiled again, gaze flickering through the sirens in front of him.

Elora lay crumpled beside Iryen, her body limp, bruised, bloodied, and still. But it wasn’t she who stole the breath from my lungs.

It was Ronan.

Folded in on himself, clutching his chest like his ribs were breaking from the inside. Gasping for air that wouldn’t come. The way I was. My brain roared with questions, screamed for clarity, but nothing made it through. Just noise. Static. Shock.

Kieran stood like a ghost, frozen, eyes wide, too stunned to move. Sienna struggled in the grip of a Triton whose resemblance to Iryen’s bastard ex was so pathetic it twisted my lip in disgust. Older. Softer. But the same cowardice in the eyes.

But none of it— none of it—compared to the thing that dragged me straight to the edge of my sanity.

She was there.

Standing beyond the broken hall like a shadow cut from rot and spite.

Ithra.

The siren who’d tried to kill me.

The one Iryen swore was dead.

Yet here she stood. Whole. Watching. Breathing.

I felt my pulse stutter and then detonate. My body tensed, fists clenching so hard my knuckles cracked. Rage surged like wildfire, burning too hot to contain. The world shrank to that single silhouette, the one thing in this ruin I wanted to break.

How the fuck was she still alive?

Every nerve in me screamed to end her. Right here. Right now. Rip through the space between us and silence her forever. She was a threat. A ghost dragged back from the grave to taunt us. To taunt her .

And I couldn’t let her keep breathing.

I wasn’t just angry. I was gone.

Fury flooded every part of me, black and wild and loud.

But before I could act—before I could rip the damn room apart— she moved.

Iryen.

She rose from the blood-slick stone, slow, deliberate, her body trembling but her presence… gods. There was fire in her eyes. Not rage. Not grief.

Power .

She stood like a queen reclaiming her throne. And in that heartbeat, when our eyes met, everything inside me ignited . The bond between us flared, hot and blinding, molten in my chest.

She was mine.

And nothing—no ex, no ghost, no god-damned siren—would ever touch her again.

I stayed hidden just beyond the ruined threshold, half-shadowed by what looked like a shattered dining hall—tables overturned, broken cutlery strewn like remnants of some perverse feast.

And I saw it.

The ex.

That smug bastard’s smirk faltered. Just for a second. But I saw it.

And I smiled.

Because he should be afraid.

They all should.

“You took everything from me, Draven.”

Iryen’s voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. Slipped through the silence like a blade, soft but deadly, a whisper that steals breath and freezes blood.

Each word that left her lips dragged the temperature lower. The very air seemed to tighten, brittle, as she stepped toward him. Her pain walked beside her, but beneath it—beneath the years of grief and betrayal—there was something older. Sharper.

Rage. Cold, timeworn, patient rage.

“My mom and dad… four years ago,” she said, eyes locked on the Triton who dared to stand upright in her presence. “And now, my grandma.”

Power crackled around her like a coming storm, invisible yet suffocating. I felt a humming in my teeth, crawling across my skin. I wanted to reach out, to grab her hand, to stop whatever came next, not out of fear for her power, but for what it might cost her.

But, gods help me, she owned this moment. Even broken, she was unmaking the chains that had bound her. She stood tall, unflinching, her fury sculpted into something devastatingly precise. Her gaze never left Draven.

“I hope you’re prepared for my wrath, Draven… because I’m doing exactly what I told you.” Her voice dropped, steel wrapped in velvet. “I’m feeding you to the sharks.”

And that’s when Ithra moved.

Too fast. Too close.

But before I could lunge forward, a shadow wrapped around her in a silent snarl, black tendrils, sleek and sharp, snapping tight around her limbs and yanking her back like a beast on a leash.

I knew those shadows.

Ronan .

But not the cocky bastard I’d first met in the cave. No, this Ronan was something else. Altered. Hardened. Whatever had happened here before I arrived had hollowed him out and filled the cracks with fury.