Page 42 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

He pulls a hand over his face. “I didn’t consider that your people wouldn’t know that aethermagic sometimes finds a home in humans and gives them certain gifts. But that doesn’t make a human anything more than attuned. Not the Maiden.”

My throat goes dry. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the girl you were with was never in danger of being taken, despite growing that lovely garden in the middle of the snow.”

The tiles underfoot glow silver with sigilweave.

“That’ll be the Council summoning you. I suggest?—”

“I don’t give a bloodied fuck what the Council wants, Tyr. You isolated us, watched our culture shift, watched how we feared and ran and pissed ourselves in front of your guards, and what…you were fine with it?”

I point a finger at him, and Tyr braces. “You kept us ignorant. Why?”

“You already know why,” he says flatly.

The tiles glow brighter, silver sparks growing more insistent, burning under my toes.

“I don’t. Why don’t you educate me?”

Shadows cling to my ankles and feet, keeping the sigilweave from taking me like it has every time before now.

“I told you, Amara. I will do everything in my power to make sure you become?—”

“And torturing my entire village is part of your master plan?”

Flames ignite in Tyr’s mirrored gaze. “Yes,” he says, stepping closer. “I would burn the continent. Raze it to the ground and sink it to the bottom of the sea. Anything to get you back.”

I stare at him, heart pounding.

“How dare you?” I snap and strike him across the face.

He doesn’t flinch.

And I hate him all the more for it.

How can he stand there, saying those things?

Looking at me like that?

I raise my hand, aiming for his other cheek, but he catches my wrist, wrenching it down as he pulls me closer. “Strike me again, Amara… ”

He leaves the rest unsaid, but his meaning is clear.

It’s a dare wrapped in a whispered invitation. Strike me and watch what happens.

I stare up at him, chest heaving against his, my arm pinned between us.

Sigilweave flares hotter on my soles.

And I see him. Finally—him. Not the king. Not the captor. Not the liar. Just another shattered thing in this broken world.

The silence stretches taut. I swallow, breathing hard, until I can stand the weight of his stare no longer.

I issue one final command.

“Kiss me.”

It’s so fast.

He doesn’t hesitate. He tears my mouth open with his, and I meet it with teeth. There is no tenderness here. No sweetness.

Only destruction.

Power for power.

Scar for scar.

Shadows rise as he pushes me back against a fractured pillar.

Stone crumbles to the ground, and the courtyard spins around us, but I seize his hair and wrench him down to my height, biting his bottom lip until I taste iron. Then push him back. Hard. Into the opposite stone pillar.

Shadows swell, surging and writhing with us.

Tyr growls low in his throat, a broken, ancient sound, and lifts me by the hips. I lock my legs around him before the thought can catch up.

Cloth tears—his, mine, ours. Skin bruises. Every motion is a battlefield. His hands are rough on my skin, worshipping the rage he’s unbound in me. His touch doesn’t try to control it, doesn’t dampen it. He meets it.

Shadows spin around me, around us.

And Tyr answers my fury with his own, dragging us to the ground, where I slam him back to the tiles.

He hisses, eyes full of fire and wrath, like something caged too long in a body too small.

“You,” I snarl into his mouth. “You are mine to destroy.”

I pull away to catch his answering smile—bloodied, beautiful. “Then do it, Maiden.”

I drag my nails down his chest, scoring him through the remnants of his silk, and he groans, low and guttural.

The sound lands beneath my skin—where it always does—and I shudder.

The shadows shiver in return and unclasp the pin at my chest.

The nyrelith pin.

The cape falls to the ground, and Tyr gazes up at me.

Something savage, brutal in his gaze.

He rips the ashen dress from me, and snow begins to fall—silent, spiraling—before it reverses, sucked back up in a sudden gale. Wind whirls around us, mingling with my shadows, twirling and dancing together.

I release him from his pants.

When he enters me, it’s not possession, not ownership.

It’s combustion.

My body swallows his, and shadows and wind collapse inward. The ruined courtyard folds in on itself. The cracked sky splits deeper, bleeding starlight and colors that have no names.

His name burns on my tongue, but I swallow it. I will not call out for him. Not now. Not ever .

He bites my shoulder. Not for pleasure. Not with tenderness.

For anchoring. And I let him.

I need it.

And I ride him with all the violence of a crowned storm. My thighs burn. Skin feverish. Deep pressure and need and ache building low in my body. Shadows and wind and snow swirl like a tornado around us.

His fingers dig deep into the flesh of my hips.

A crack splits the sky—thundersnow, roaring like the world’s death rattle—and for one breathless instant, the courtyard is silver-lit ruin. Mirrored tiles shatter, splitting into a thousand shards as the ground sinks in.

As if the world cannot contain our violence. Our myth.

Release builds not as pleasure but as death and cataclysm.

Cold lashes across my back like a whip of wind and sleet everywhere his hands touch my skin.

Ice forms on my arms, my thighs, and melts again, chasing the heat he drags out of me.

He drives into me harder, faster, reckless, and I meet every thrust with the fury of a thousand dead Maidens screaming through my blood.

And when we fall together, it’s not release.

It’s obliteration.

I come apart in his arms and he in mine, our cries ripped from us like offerings, like oaths, like the last prayer of a broken realm.

And when we finally still?—

When our bodies collapse, trembling and bloodied against the stone and glass and ice?—

The world does not put itself back together.

It waits.

Trembles.

Because it knows the end has begun.