She turned, scrambled, slipped on blood and grit. The man grabbed her by the arm, yanking her back hard enough to pop her shoulder.
“Don’t make me ruin that face,” he hissed.
But she wasn’t listening anymore.
She saw the threads.
Silver. Shimmering in the air, writhing like strands of something half-living. They danced across her vision, she knew they were real because they felt real—tugging at her spine, twining around her fingers, humming inside her ribs like a second heartbeat. Her hair began to rise.
She didn’t whisper a word or raise a blade. She just looked at him, focused and lethal.
He faltered.
“What—”
His neck snapped. Just like that. She felt his spine give beneath her palm—bones breaking, flesh yielding, life dissolving into nothing.
And she hadn’t touched him. Not once.
He dropped on the ground. Silent. Final.
Evelyne stood there, swaying. Her body trembled like a bowstring still quivering from release. And then came the pain.
Sharp, immediate, blinding. It wasn’t just her hand this time. It was everywhere, surging through her skull like fire and ice tangled into one. Hot blood trickled from her nose, running over her lips, metallic and bitter.
It tasted like a price.
Her legs buckled. The stones beneath her seemed to lurch upward to meet her as she fell to her knees with a soundless gasp, but she forced her head up. Alaric was looking at her. Across the ruin, past blood and broken bodies, his eyes found hers. Wide. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her shaking hand, tasting copper and stubbornness.
She didn’t care anymore. Let them send her to the halter. Let the gods strike her down. Let the court whisper of madness and broken lineage, magic and ruin. Let it all come crashing down. None of it mattered. Nothing mattered now.
With gritted teeth, Evelyne dragged herself forward, her knees scraping across the stone, heedless of the pain. She reached Thalen’s body and folded over it like something hollow.
Her arms curled around him.
Her forehead pressed to his shoulder.
And then she cracked.
Chapter 74
He pulled the blade from the body of the last mercenary, but what he saw nearly stopped his heart.
Evelyne was on her knees, streaked with blood and dirt, and something that looked like vomit, her hands were shaking, her face was ghost-pale. And the mercenary—the one—lay twisted at her feet, neck snapped clean, eyes wide and sightless.
There was no way she could do this with her bare hands.
He looked around sharply, scanning the ruin—Ravik was still locked in a brutal duel near the archway, Cedric had a blade to someone’s throat, and Vesena was gone from view. The priests were dead. Most of the mercenaries too.
He forced himself upright, teeth gritted against the fire burning in his side, and ran to the mercenary. The body. The evidence. He crossed the distance and plunged the blade into the man’s neck with deliberate fury. And left it there.
Breathing heavily, he turned to her. She looked at him, cradling Thalen’s body close to her chest, tears mixed with blood were streaming down her face. He wanted to approach her but something that broke free from the hells itself, stopped him.
It started with a rustle—barely more than a breath of movement.
A broken gait shuffled into the light. A glint of something metallic—jewelry or madness, Alaric couldn’t immediately tell.
The woman emerged from the sea of corpses like a fever dream given shape. She was older, bent nearly double, her skin a sickly parchment hue stretched too thin over brittle bones. Blood leaked sluggishly from an open wound at her neck, painting a jagged trail down the tattered drapery of what had once been brown robes and a long blond braid.
