“I’ll kill him.”
I looked up, heart hammering, throat dry. “Varyth?—”
“I’ll tear him apart,” he said again, louder now, voice raw with fury. “I don’t care what power he holds. I don’t care if the gods themselves put him on that throne. I will make himchokeon every drop of blood he spilled.” His hands slammed against the stone wall, hard enough to echo.
For a moment I wanted to let him believe it. Wanted to be the version of myself they all expected, the one who had been tortured and survived. The one who deserved this kind of rage.
But watching the fury blaze through him, watching what he would do for me, made the lie feel like a fresh wound.
“Varyth,” I said again, quieter this time. “Please.”
His head whipped toward me. “He harmed you.”
I let the silence confirm it.
Fenric hovered nearby, close but not quite touching. His presence warm, steady. As though he wanted to reach for me but didn’t know if he should. Didn’t know if it would hurt me more. The grief in his expression was soft and gutting.
Lincatheron, by contrast, stood stiff and seething near the wall, arms folded, wings twitching in minute bursts of tension. He hadn’t said a word since I returned—but his silence was loud. A furnace of rage simmered just beneath the surface. I knew that look. He was counting breaths. Calculating casualties. He wouldn’t speak until he could control it.
“He dies for this,” Varyth snarled, shaking with rage. “I will end him myself. With my hands. Slowly.”
I swallowed. My fingers dug into the stone at my sides. “Stop.”
“I should’ve torn his throat out the moment he looked at you. The moment he spoke your name.”
“You couldn’t,” I snapped before I could stop myself. “They had you in chains, same as me.”
He flinched. I hated myself for it. But I couldn’t break here. Couldn’t let the mask slip. Not yet. Not when this might be our only chance at survival.
“I’m back now,” I said. “That’s what matters.”
Varyth crossed the cell in two steps and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me against him like if he pressed hard enough, he could keep all my pieces from coming undone.
His embrace was warmth and fury, the tremble in his chest giving away how tightly he was holding it in. I felt the pulse of his magic beneath his skin, erratic, barely contained by the collar.
“I should have protected you,” he whispered into my hair.
I didn’t deserve his guilt. I’d lied to him. I was still lying, right now, in his arms.
And worse—worse—a part of me didn’t even regret it.
Because if Varyth knew the truth… if he knew I’d touched the monster, tended him… if he knew I’d looked Ashterion in the eye and told him I believed he meant me no harm.
My stomach twisted.
Why had I said that?
Why had I looked into the face of the Shadow Lord, the creature whispered about in blood-soaked corners of fae history, and thought—maybe?
Maybe he wasn’t what they said.
It had been a moment. A flicker. But I’d meant it. I had looked at his wound, at the way his breath caught when I touched him, at the crack in his mask, and I had believed he wouldn’t harm me.
I was a fool.
Varyth’s arms tightened around me. “You’re safe now,” he murmured. “You’re safe.”
I wanted to scream that I didn’t even know what safe meant anymore. That I didn’t know where the lines were—between mercy and manipulation, between pity and power, between the person I was and the thing I was becoming to survive this.
