Fala was maybe twenty feet away, seated on a wide stone path beside another female: Inola Rising Moon, her arm wrapped in bandages, face bruised, and one eye swollen shut.
Usti loomed over them, pacing in short bursts. His shirt was soaked, dark with water and blood. A scorch mark marred part of his face, and had burned away a portion of his hair.
His voice echoed through the chamber, manic and cracked. “This wasn’t what I wanted. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.”
A knife flashed in his hand.
Kai tightened the grip on her sword.
Atsadi pulled her against him, one arm bracketing her chest. His heart beat wildly against her back. “Wait,” he whispered into her ear.
He pointed to a fissure opening in the wall beside Usti. Water seeped and spat from it.
If Usti was aware, he didn’t show it.
“I’ll protect you,” Inola said to her son. “You know I will.”
“And return to a life where I’m left behind?” Usti spat. “Firstborn, but never first choice. Never given the same chances. I could have been more.” He aimed into the mines below. “More thanthis!”
Usti straightened and stared unblinking at his mother. “You know what I could have been for our people. You had it within your power to call for change. Instead, you let them look through me. You left me torotin these mines.”
The wall split with a deafeningcrack?—
Water burst through the crack with a roar, flinging all three toward the fractured edge of the abyss.
The ground gave way beneath their enemy.
Not in soil or stone, but in will. One by one, the Soterran line broke, and the Perean tide surged forward, unrelenting.
Dimitrios fought like a man possessed, his breath a steady beat. And around him, his people, the mighty heart. Not only soldiers, but those sons and daughters of a land they refused to surrender.
With every drop of blood, he thought of his broken father. His fierce, unfailing mother. Of the councilmen who sat in their polished chairs and told him to wait while other men decided his future. As if his birthright were something to earn through silence and inaction.
They’d turned him into a man who was quiet. Obedient. Powerless.
Today, he would show the world who Dimitrios Vidalatos really was.
A man who would not be pushed aside or disregarded. Not anymore.
Dimitrios drove through the Sotteran lines, unleashed. His body screamed for rest, but his mind pulled him deeper into enemy territory.
“I am your enemy.”
Milonia’s voice—her betrayal—only sharpened the blade in his hands.
Other memories snuck through, too. The way the morning light made her skin glow. How her body shivered when he touched her.
“Power always comes at a cost,” she’d told him once. “Few women survive such ambition, especially ones in my position. I have Caius to consider.”
Had she been trying to tell him, even then, who she really was?
He was the fool who hadn’t listened, letting his heart guide him into her bed. Blinded by a beautiful face and the promise of a new family.
Caius’s open laugh echoed in his skull, as bright as a curse.
Dimitrios roared into the open sky, throat raw, blood singing in his ears.
A Sotteran soldier lunged from the fray, sword high.
