Page 36 of Risen (Love and Revenge #6)

She stepped aside as Yukio approached. The pixie-yuki-onna cross flicked his wrist and a blade of ice formed in his hand.

He moved with the silent grace of a dancer and the deadly assurance of an assassin.

“Remember all the times you coerced me into killing for you?” he said, his rich, melodic voice full of darkness.

He bent to catch the back of O’Dell’s neck and draw him close.

“Remember how you told me the blood was pretty flowing over the ice?”

Then he sank his ice blade into O’Dell’s heart. When he yanked it back out, he held the blade up, studying it for a second. “Hmm… it is quiet pretty, don’t you think?”

The fae king dropped to the ground, dead.

As Yukio resumed his position on the stairs, Robin turned to the crowd once more, gesturing to the salamanders to release the prisoners one at a time into the spell circle. “Begin.”

Even after O’Dell’s execution, one of the kneeling vampires spat blood and refused Robin’s offer.

A thin line of shadow whipped out from Dusek’s hand, parting the vamp’s head from his body before he could finish cursing Robin’s lineage.

As the vampire’s corpse fell to the ground, Robin raised one eyebrow at the prisoners.

The message was crystal clear. O’Dell wasn’t just a special case.

We weren’t playing around here. I moved closer to the bottom of the steps.

Another shifter snarled and lunged for Robin.

I cut him down myself before he even got close.

But despite those little outbursts, more than half of the prisoners bent their heads and asked for forgiveness, broken, shamed, desperate—but alive.

They stepped into the spell circle and swore to cast off the syndicate’s ways and protect the weak.

One after another, their voices rose, some bitter, some relieved, all binding themselves with the combined magic of the curse and the fae bargain.

The light flared each time, searing the truth into their bones.

By the end, the number of bodies left cooling on the cobblestones was far smaller than I had expected.

The bloodshed was enough to appease the gathered crowd of wounded unaligned, and the angry mood from before shifted.

The justice delt tonight had been brutal.

But it was balanced with mercy. I think they were all ready, now, to accept what Ruya had said about starting over.

I sheathed my blade and glanced at Robin.

She put up a good show, but I could see the way her shoulders sagged, just ever so slightly.

Ruya touched her hand, and Sadavir gave the dragon princess a barely perceptible nod before lightly touching his fingers to the small of Robin’s back in a fleeting gesture that once would have cost him his hand.

The dual mate bonds hummed around them, visible even to me in the way their breathing aligned, the way their auras wove together.

I watched them in shock as I realized that…

maybe Robin had gained more tonight than a single true mate bond with our omega.

For the first time, I dared to believe that our court might actually survive the fallout of all this, without being blown apart from the inside by our conflicting feelings and connections.

We staggered back into The Fox at last, stepping over rubble, taking in the mess of our broken home. Wood was splintered, marble and brick cracked and crumbling, every gilded surface coated in dust from the explosions, the air sour with the lingering remnants of a broken curse.

But it was ours.

The court picked our way through the rubble to the stage area that held Robin’s display of priceless art.

I was surprised this part of her hoard hadn’t been looted once the cult cleared out.

But then again, this was just proof of how well respected our princess and our court was.

We had sheltered, and fed, and protected the unaligned and homeless in the area for years.

The Fox was apparently off limits when it came to opportunistic looting.

We collapsed where we could—on cracked seats, against pillars, on the stage that was still somehow intact, if a bit dusty.

My body screamed with sudden exhaustion, now that I let my guard down, my arms heavy and my body sticky with sweat and grime.

I leaned back against a broken column at the edge of the stage and closed my eyes, letting the sound of my family around me fill the silence.

Tomorrow we would rebuild. But for tonight, it was enough just to be together and alive.

Ruya snuggled up at my side, bringing Robin and Sadavir with her like a couple of well-trained puppies.

I grinned, my eyes still closed, as the entire court slowly gathered around her, the heart of the court.

Someone threw a stack of cushions at us, ripped from various pieces of broken furniture.

Someone else took down one of the massive velvet curtains from the stage and threw it over the heap of us.

A growing warmth told me Sanaka had created a magical heat source nearby.

I snorted at the fact that there was probably an intact bedroom around her somewhere —at a hotel, if not in the theater—but we were all clearly so tired and so stubbornly attached our home that we were content to pass out here on the dirty floor instead.

Sleep dragged me under before I could comment.