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“And since you took such pleasure torturing my grandmother …” My voice twisted into something far more dangerous than rage, delight . “You’ll repay the favor. You’ll punish your own son . Fitting, isn’t it?”

Panic bloomed in her eyes like blood in water.

I gripped her tighter, yanking her mind until her body moved in shudders, stumbling toward Draven like a broken puppet. Her hands twitched. Her shoulders locked. But still she swam.

I made her bend . I made her submit .

She clawed mentally at the walls of her prison, but there was no escape. I had built this cell from her worst fears, and I held the only key.

The dagger scraped against the marble as I made her pick it up. Her fingers were shaking too hard to grip it, so I forced them closed around the hilt.

Draven roared in fury, fighting me with everything he had. But I didn’t care. His strength meant nothing in the face of my will. His fire was mine to snuff.

His mother —his symbol, his shield, his puppet-master—was now mine.

And I shattered her right in front of him .

I felt his desperation. I drank it. It was intoxicating. The helplessness in his eyes, the despair wrapping around his spine—gods; it fed me.

She pleaded with me in broken sobs, the sounds barely scraping out of her throat. But her words were weightless.

I’d already decided.

There would be no salvation here. Only pain.

Only penance.

As she stumbled forward, dagger in hand, soul in tatters, I let myself feel it: the satisfaction. The power.

Her despair was art.

But this?

This was just the overture.

Because what I was about to do to Draven…

Would make the underworld weep.

“You three can have Thalor,” I murmured to my inner court, my voice as smooth as melody, yet laced with venom. I didn’t turn to look at them. I didn’t need to. They knew better than to question me.

My gaze remained locked on Ithra, who continued dashing my punishments into her son.

Her limbs twitched with resistance, jerking in unnatural, puppet-like spasms as I pulled the strings tighter.

She clawed at control, at dignity, at anything, but it slipped further away with every step she took toward her son.

Draven’s anguish was a song, and gods, how it played in perfect time with the rhythm of my pulse. Each note of his suffering plucked a string inside me I hadn’t known existed. I didn’t just hear his torment. I felt it.

“Ithra and Draven,” I said, my voice dipping lower, colder, darker. “They’re mine… and Adrian’s.”

A pause. The weight of their names lingered on my tongue like a sacrament.

“They don’t get to die quickly,” I whispered. “They get to understand .”

Let them watch as I peeled back everything that made them whole. Feel the slow, creeping dread of their undoing. Let Adrian taste what it meant to burn someone from the inside out, not with fire, but with vengeance.

It was a ritual.

And they were the chosen sacrifices.

I didn’t even blink when Thalor’s screams ripped through the hall—high, sharp, guttural.

A shriek carved from pure suffering. His agony echoed off the stone like a hymn to everything we had lost, and everything I was reclaiming.

Blue lightning cracked through the air a moment later, sizzling and alive, its glow dancing like phantom fire across the walls.

It was beautiful, divine, even. A crescendo of retribution.

A slow, savage smirk curled at the edge of my mouth. My court was painting justice in blood and pain, and gods, it was art. They had been silenced, broken, and denied this for too long. Now, they sang with fury.

I almost missed the shift—the whisper of movement beside me—until I felt it.

Adrian.

His arm slid around my waist, steady and possessive, his touch warm against the icy rage coiled in my spine. Then his lips found the scar on my shoulder. A ghosting brush that should have meant nothing—lost beneath the roaring storm inside me—but it wasn’t.

The touch struck me like lightning of another kind. Not pain. Not vengeance.

Tenderness.

I flinched .

Not from fear. Not from him. But because of that small, unexpected softness, something cracked through my fury like a fracture in black glass. The haze stuttered, flickering at the edges. For a heartbeat, the fire dimmed.

“Don’t give more to this bastard than he already took,” Adrian purred, his voice sliding into my mind like silk wrapped around a blade, seductive, commanding, impossible to ignore. “He isn’t worth losing your soul for.”

His words sliced through the fog, clean and precise, parting the storm that thundered inside me.

I blinked.

My gaze drifted from Ithra’s shattered form to the churning void inside my chest. That endless, insatiable rage. Adrian was right. Of course he was. He always was.

He saw the cracks even I refused to acknowledge. And he stayed.

But the fire refused to die. It coiled around my ribs, snarling, seething, whispering that this wasn’t enough. Their screams had only scratched the surface of what they owed.

“I’m not giving him my soul,” I said, voice low and frigid as the abyss. My stare remained locked on Ithra, her sobs unraveling in the air like a broken hymn. “But death is far too kind.”

“Good,” he murmured, tightening his grip around my waist like he could anchor me with sheer will.

I felt his heat behind me, burning where I remained frozen, grounding where I was unraveling.

“Because you’re mine. And while death might be easy for them, I won’t lose you to the darkness.

I can feel it creeping into your mind, Princess…

whispering, hungry. Don’t let it take more. ”

His voice wasn’t a plea. It was a warning wrapped in devotion. Not fear. Not judgment. Just truth. And, gods, it dug deep.

I clenched my jaw, fury colliding with clarity.

If I let the darkness hollow me out—if I let it consume every soft, bright thing left inside me—then Draven would win. Not because he lived. But because he would have turned me into something else. Something less. Something ruined.

He wouldn’t just take my family.

He would take me .

And that… that I would never allow.

My hands slowly unfurled at my sides. Not in surrender. But in control.

He wasn’t worth the last of my light.

They had already stolen too much.

They would take nothing more.

My power surged—cold, merciless, and exacting—as I drove deeper into Ithra’s mind.

There were no screams. No last pleas. Only the broken glass.

Layer by layer, I peeled her thoughts apart, scraping memory from marrow, severing every thread of self until the tapestry of who she was ceasing to exist.

Her pride.

Her malice.

Her cruelty. All of it is gone.

I didn’t destroy just her thoughts. I erased the architecture that held them, imploded her mind from the inside out until what remained was not a woman, not even a ghost, but a shell. A vacant husk, blank and hollow, robbed of every shred of sentience.

Draven watched.

The flicker of his mother’s soul died in her eyes. Her spine went rigid. Then slack.

Dead.

His jaw clenched, veins bulging in his neck as he strained against the invisible grip I held him with. Rage warred with helplessness in his expression. And underneath it, raw, undeniable grief .

He had already lost.

Just like I had four years ago.

I watched him break—slowly, painfully—as every breath he drew became another reminder that he had failed. That she was gone. That he was next.

Each fracture in his composure fed something dark and euphoric inside me. Every heartbeat was a dirge, every second an eternity as his torment unfolded before my eyes.

But then he moved.

Draven thrashed with renewed ferocity, shadows writhing around him like starving beasts. He must’ve spent years fortifying his mental shields, preparing to fight me. I felt the strain of holding him slip, my grip faltering like blood through water.

And he felt it too.

His lips twisted into a triumphant, a feral grin.

In a blink of an eye, he snatched the dagger from his mother’s limp hand. The blade caught the faint golden light, thirsty for more blood. His gaze locked on mine, cold and focused, vengeance bleeding from every pore.

“Kieran! Shields, now!” I shouted, my voice cracking the air like a whip.

Sparks burst to life in Kieran’s hands, fusing into a crackling dome of lightning that snapped into place around him, Ronan, Elora, and Sienna. The water vibrated with the charge, alive with power.

But Adrian and I stood outside the barrier.

Too close.

Too exposed.

Draven’s grin widened as his shadows pulsed, writhing like a living nightmare. The hall shrank, the world collapsing until only three figures remained. He, Adrian, and I.

“Stay behind me,” Adrian murmured, stepping in front of me.

“No,” I said, my voice a blade drawn from its sheath. “This ends now. For my family. My people. And for me.”

Draven laughed, a low, chilling sound as his shadows lunged.

I called my father’s trident into my hand. The weight was grounding, the glow of its golden tips a steady pulse in the storm. In tandem, thick rings of water twisted into chains, coiling around Draven’s arms and yanking them back.

He hissed as the restraints locked tight.

I turned. With Adrian’s hands raised, his focus sharp, his power radiated through the water like a current.

My chest swelled.

He had done this.

He had forged weapons from the very element that defined my people and used them to protect us.

“Nice touch,” I muttered, eyes still on Draven. The chains tightened. His shadow snapped violently but couldn’t break free.

Adrian said nothing, but his stance was a vow.

“You think that’ll stop me?” Draven snarled, writhing against the binds.

“It’s not about stopping you,” Adrian said, coldness lacing his voice. “It’s about showing you how powerless you really are.”

“What’s the plan, Princess?” he added, low and tight, fury just under the surface.

“The longer he lives, the greater the threat,” I answered, stepping forward, each word laced with finality. “It’s time I finished this.”

Draven’s eyes widened. Just a breath.

Then I struck.

The trident plunged into his chest, clean and final. Power rippled up my arms, the recoil sharp. His breath hitched. His sneer fell apart.

For a heartbeat, there was silence. Peace. Victory.

Then agony.

Searing white-hot pain exploded through my back.

I gasped as ice—thick, jagged, merciless—tore through my flesh. My tail spasmed, vision swimming. I turned, barely catching the smug grin on Thalor’s face, his arm still raised in mock triumph.

It was his last moment.

Lightning flashed, Adrian’s bolt of rage slicing through the water like a god’s fury.

Thalor’s head separated cleanly from his body, and the room illuminated in a burst of blinding gold.

The scent of ozone and blood flooded the space.

My body gave way. My vision fractured.

Adrian’s face—twisted in panic—was the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole.