Before she could ask another question, a hand struck her across the face with vicious force. Pain exploded across her cheek, sharp and disorienting. Evelyne crumpled sideways onto the cold stone floor.
Isildeth shrieked, a high, terrified sound that bounced against the ancient walls. Thalen jerked against his bonds with a hoarse cry, eyes wide, lips moving around her name.
“Shut your mouth!” the man snarled.
She stayed down for a breath. Two. The taste of iron rising in her throat. The ringing in her ears swallowing the rest. Humiliation burned hotter than the pain, prickling along theback of her neck, telling her she should look away, hide, fold in on herself.
She didn’t.
Evelyne gathered the pain, fury, helplessness, and shoved it into the quiet, locked box where she kept all useless things, and looked up.
They weren’t cultists this time. They came wrapped in hardened leather. Mercenaries, most likely, their skin was inked with dark tattoos that coiled along their necks and forearms. Blades hung low at their hips. She counted twenty, or more.
The one who struck her stood out not for his size, but for the cruelty he didn’t bother to hide. Wiry, fox-eyed, with a hooked scar dragging down one side of his cheek. Now he crouched beside her, teeth bared in something too lazy to be a grin.
“Keep an eye on the pretty one,” he said to others, not bothering to whisper. His breath stank of metal and something sour. “We’ve got to complete the verse.”
Two others flanked her on either side, hands resting on the hilts of worn blades. One of them reeked faintly of blood and clove oil; the other had a tattoo snaking up the side of his neck that disappeared into his collar.
“She’s the right one,” the tattooed man muttered. “But if she cracks early, we’ve still got the boy.”
“I’d rather not use him,” Scarface said, snorting. “Too much fire in that one. You saw how he bit Dorian?”
“Still the same noble blood,” the other one quipped.
Evelyne’s breath hitched.
Another two moved in behind Halwen. The rest of the hired blades melted into the shadows along the crumbling perimeter of the old ruin, forming a ring.
Scarface leaned in again. “Doesn’t matter how noble the blood. We just need enough of it.”
“Thandros said the timing has to be exact. Rite won’t work without full resonance,” the tattooed man murmured. “We’ll need more essence than last time.”
Evelyne’s gaze snapped toward them.Essence?
Her heart thudded against her ribs.
She didn’t speak, didn’t move—but her mind raced. That wasn't a metaphor. Not with these people.
Her stomach turned sharply, an echo of bile rising unbidden. Her hands prickled, trembling faintly before she could still them. And behind her eyes—Dasmon’s face, pale and slack in death, the cruel red carving at his mouth.
She swallowed hard, forcing the memory back, anchoring herself in the steady rhythm of her own breath. Aware now of every rise and fall of her chest, every fragile second it still moved.
She closed her eyes again, just for a shaky breath.
She would not let Thalen die here on an altar of someone else's prophecy. And gods help them all—she would not die as anyone’s sacrifice.
Chapter 69
Cedric moved at the front of the group. It wasn’t obvious by rank. It was by the simple, practical logic that if something leapt out of the dark to slit their throats, he preferred it hit him first rather than the prince.
Alaric, grim-faced and sharp-eyed, walked behind him. Ravik was further back, pale and favoring his side, but still upright with the force of a man who refused to fall until the job was done. Vesena moved quietly, ghostlike as ever, scanning the walls of the tunnel with deadly focus.
The soldiers trailed behind, their boots thudding in an uneven rhythm against the slick stones of the hidden tunnels beneath Orvath’s chapel. They pressed deeper until the passage opened into a broad, natural cave—the same one they had stumbled across days earlier.
Only now, standing there, Cedric saw it differently.
Ravik stepped forward, grimacing as he did, and began giving orders.
