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Then something colder than fear pulled at me.

It started as a whisper beneath my skin, then spread.

Whatever it was, it didn’t just frighten me.

It devoured. It moved through my veins like ice, carving into my bones with an ache that felt older than time, older than flame or blood or memory.

It wanted something. No, it wanted everything .

And it was coming for me.

Rok stepped through the haze and his siphon hand was aimed right at me.

“What are you doing?” I gasped.

It felt like he was peeling the light from inside me, thread by thread. Like he had reached in and found the softest part of my soul and begun to tear.

“He’s draining you,” Archer snarled. “Threading your shadows like their forbidden.” He lunged. In one fluid motion, he drew his dagger and slammed Rok back, the blade pressed to his throat. “Let her go,” Archer hissed. “Now.”

“She’s not strong enough to wield both,” Rok said sharply. “You’re wasting your fight. ”

My vision blurred. Shadows tore loose from my chest with every breath. “Did you send me here to die?” I asked.

Archer shook his head, wild-eyed. “I would’ve died for you. I broke the bond to save you.”

The last of the shadows tore free, curling into the dirt like smoke. I reached for them, desperate to gather the pieces—but they slipped through my fingers like water. With my next breath, I felt the hollowness inside.

I had no shadows left.

“Why?” My voice cracked as I turned to Rok. “Why would you take them?”

His eyes didn’t burn with triumph. They burned with grief. “This is the promise we made, Severyn,” he said softly. “Demetria must survive.”

I remembered the bargain we had made in Lorna’s shed. I turned to Archer, stumbling the last few steps until my hand found his shoulder. His breath hitched beneath my touch.

“Take them,” I said. “They’re yours.”

He didn’t look at me. His blade remained fixed at Rok’s throat. “No, you need the shadows to remain as my heir.”

I said quietly, “Ciaran didn’t give them to me. You did.”

He turned, just slightly. “Keep them.”

I slid my hand from his shoulder to the hilt of his blade, and it dropped between us with a dull thud. “Take them back.”

“I can’t,” he rasped.

“Please.” My voice trembled as I cupped his jaw, fingers brushing the stubble on his chin. “It’s the only way.”

He didn’t move.

So I did.

I pulled him toward me and kissed him—hard, desperate, like I was falling apart and he was the only thing keeping me together. A breath. A fire. A plea pressed against his mouth, begging him to take what was never truly mine .

His hands gripped my waist. Then he kissed me back.

Darkness surged around us, ribbons of ash and fractured shadow tearing from my chest and flooding into his. It wasn’t gentle. It was fire and mist and the sound of bones breaking. Like the earth itself had cracked open to witness something old being made whole again.

Then it stopped.

Archer pulled back, his breath still tangled with mine. In his open palm, the half-crescent relic pulsed with shadow light.

I looked down, and mine was gone.

A gasp caught in my throat. “We fight this war together,” I whispered.

Archer lifted his hand and pressed his palm to my cheek. “Together,” he said.

But then every muscle in Archer’s body locked. His gaze shifted past me, to the silver-tipped arrow aimed at my heart—and the bow it belonged to, gripped tightly in Rok’s hands.

“Now I don’t feel so guilty being the one to do this,” Rok said, stepping through the smoke.

All around us, Antonia, Kian, and a dozen guards twisted toward me in stunned silence.

“A life for a life,” Rok murmured. “Someone more important might need saving.”

And I understood. He wasn’t aiming to end me out of hatred, he was forcing the civilians of Demetria, those bound by oath and Night-blood, to rise up and die in my place.

“Rok,” I begged, stepping forward as my voice splintered. “These are your people. Your sister’s people. Don’t do this.”

But his expression didn’t falter. “They were never mine. Demetria will survive, but Archer needs to understand what it means to lose. Like I did. No excuses now that his power is back.”

He released the string .

A blur of motion split the field. Kian lunged into the arrow’s path, and a guttural scream ripped through the barren land. For one breathless moment, everything stood still. Then I saw the blood. It spilled from a chest that should never have been near that arrow.

Caius Sinclair.

Kian groaned, dragging himself upright. “Shit. Did I die?”

But he was untouched.

“Caius!” I cried, stumbling toward the fallen heir. “Caius!”

That was it. The final thread of Rok’s siphon snapped, and I tore free. Caius lay crumpled in the ash, his blood soaking into the soil, red against the gray. I dropped beside him, hands trembling as I tried to stop the flow.

“Why the hell would you take an arrow for me?” I choked, pressing my hands to his chest, trying to stop the blood that kept spilling through my fingers. His auburn hair clung to his forehead, damp with sweat, and his soft green-brown eyes burned with a fear he couldn’t mask.

It hadn’t been chance. It wasn’t instinct. No—it was the damn invisibility quell. He’d been beside me the entire time.

Caius tilted his head toward the sky, a shaky breath leaving him as his eyes lost focus. “Stop fussing.” His lips twitched in a faint, almost-smile. “I always wanted a sister.”

“We could start over,” I said. “You and me.”

“No.” His voice cracked. “Too late.”

I pressed my hands over the wound. There was too much blood. “It’s just an arrow. You’ll be fine. You have to be fine.”

“No.”

“Caius—it’s never too late.”

“For me it is.” His breath shuddered. “Forget the mess that is our bloodline. None of it matters.”

“It doesn’t,” I choked. “May this be the moment it stops mattering. ”

“Then let me be the brother who never betrayed you,” he whispered. “The one you deserved.”

“You are my brother, Caius. You are. We have the rest of our lives to make up for it.”

His voice was barely a breath now. “I would’ve been a damn good one. Yeah… I know it.”

“Archer!” I sobbed. “Help him—please! Stop the bleeding!”

“Severyn.”

“Please! He’s dying!”

“He’s gone.”

I shook my head. “No. He can’t be. He—he—” The words refused to come.

I shook Caius’s body, but he didn’t blink. He didn’t move. And the mourning cry of griffins sounded across the peaks from the scream that tore from my lungs.

Archer pulled me off his body. “Archer, he can’t just die like that. Tell me he’ll wake up.”

“Severyn, nothing I say will bring him back. He’s gone, and I know it hurts because you never got the chance to know him.”

I collapsed in his arms, the weight of it all dragging me down.

Then, from across the battlefield, a familiar voice rose above the silence. “My dear daughter,” she said softly. “How much grief I never meant for you to carry.”

My mother stood there. Her dark hair was slicked back, tangled by the wind, just as I remembered. The same striking features, all sharp angles and impossible beauty. Her black eyes locked on mine. Perhaps she had never seen me this broken. Or perhaps she had, and turned away the first time, too.

Archer’s arms fell away. I dropped to my knees beside Caius, tore the arrow from his chest with a strangled sob, and rose—hands slick with blood, the shaft clenched in my grip as I turned and leveled it at her throat .

“Why?” I demanded.

She flinched. “You’re fighting with the very people who would bury you. Think about that.”

And just like that, the battlefield stilled. Death had stepped into the war.

“Who is my father?” I hissed. I wanted to hear it from her. Hear her say his damn name

“I loved the man who raised you more than you’ll ever understand,” she whispered.

Her gaze drifted somewhere far away, regret threading through every word.

“One day, I chose his life over mine. I thought I was saving him. You have no idea what I gave up, what it cost me. Knox, Klaus... and you. You are my only children.”

Klaus. The sound of his name hit like a blade. I flinched. “What about Charles? Cully?”

Her stance didn’t waver. “Your father won his title, but having a child with heat in their blood risked everything. Our name, our standing. I gave him the freedom to choose differently,” she said. “I was tired. Tired of pretending. Of surviving.”

“No,” I breathed, the word scraping my throat raw. “I don’t believe you.”

“It is the truth.”

My mind whirred in a million directions. I didn’t understand how this lie had gone on for so long. Charles and Cully weren’t related to me.

“I was loved deeply by Hadrian,” she went on, “and by your father. When one becomes a Serpent, they can feel and hear their truemate. I was never meant to be your father’s. And I never will.”

Rok clapped once, slicing through the silence. “Enough family drama. It’s time to end the reign of the Forgotten. Your mother will be punished for her crimes against Verdonia for the rest of her miserable life.”

My mother’s voice softened. “My child… If you must hunt me, I will forgive you. We are fighting the same force that killed your brother. I know you’ll choose wisely.”

I held the arrowhead to her throat, my hands trembling. “I should kill you for all of the lies.” I raised my flame, the heat pulsing below her chin.

“Kill me,” she whispered. “I deserve it.” Her eyes closed, lashes trembling. She had accepted the same fate she once gave her own mother. The symmetry of it made my stomach twist. “I deserve it,” she repeated, softer this time, like a confession too late to matter.

But I didn’t strike her.

Instead, I drove my flame into the ground. Fire cracked through the dirt, and a spiral of ash erupted around us, spinning higher and faster, until it folded into itself and tore open a portal. Heat shimmered at its edges, unstable and wild.

“Find flame,” I whispered. “Find home.”