Curiosity… no, that’s not it. It’s…
Recognition.
“He knows me,”I say, gaze locked on him.
We know him.
A flicker rises, buried deep in my mind, too distant to grasp. But real. My spine burns. My darkness pulses. A feeling like… nostalgia.
The vines still writhe beside him, thick with the remnants of all their fury, but he doesn’t even glance at them.
No tension in his face, no shift in his posture. It’s like he’s been trained not to react, like it’s been drilled into him.
Something isn’t right, and judging by the way he watches me, he knows it too.
“Who are you?” he asks.
There’s a thread of something he meant to hide, coiled just beneath the surface of his voice. I don’t pull it gently.
I rip.
“Don’t intervene,”I command.
Then I step forwards, out of the shadows and their eyes find me, all of them. The commanders. My bonds.
I move between Ezekial and Kane. Not behind them, beside.
“I survived the Green Cloaks attack at The Inferno,” I say, looking at them all, but only one reacts wrong. “I am an empath.” I feel their instinctive shut-down, their panic, but it’s too late.
My darkness bristles, crawling beneath my skin. “And I’m their bond.”
The thread snaps.
Chapter 33: Jasmine
He lunges.
My men try to stop him, but I’m faster. One step through the shadows, and he’s mine.
We’re in the Dark Realm now, and he’s hauled upwards, chains of darkness coiling tight around his ankles, holding him high enough that his face is level with mine.
I don’t let anyone in, because he ismine.
“He said you were dead,” the traitor pants, then groans as my slivers tighten. “He said you… you were executed.”
Darkness encases him in a cocoon of black, slowly crushing.
“I-if… if you kill me… they’ll know. They’ll… find you... they’ll find you and—”
One of his arms tears free, so easily, like pulling the wing off a fly.The leg off an ant.
Nothing.
Blood pours from him, spurting from jagged arteries, gushing in a crimson waterfall onto the ground. I think he’s screaming, but I can’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart, and the dark voice within.
Kill him.
Avenge them.
