To take him away from Fenric forever.
“I can’t. Linc, I can’t?—”
“You can,” he insisted, that terrible certainty shining in his eyes. “You can, Isara. For him. For all of us.”
But I was staring at Fenric, at the way he was reaching for us with shaking hands, his face streaked with tears and blood and absolute terror. At the love written in every line of his broken body as he tried to drag himself closer, tried to stop what he thought was about to happen.
At Linc, who was trying so hard to be brave for all of us. Who was willing to die to save the man he loved.
And I knew with sudden, crystalline clarity, that I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t hurt Linc. I couldn’t take him away from Fenric. I couldn’t live with the sound Fenric would make when the blade found its mark.
But I could save them both.
My grip shifted on the dagger, angling the blade inward, the point now hovering over my own heart.
The dagger trembled in my grip, but my heart had never been steadier.
This—this I could choose.
I took a breath. A shuddering, final breath.
Just one movement. One push. One decision that I could control.
The world had stripped everything else from me. But this was mine.
My fingers tightened on the hilt. The blade kissed my skin, the first prick of pain a whisper of what would come.
A promise of release.
“Don’t you fucking dare.” Linc’s voice shattered across the chamber, no longer gentle, no longer steady. Pure panic, raw and desperate. “Isara, don’t you fucking dare.”
Cindrissian was shouting something in a fae tongue that I didn’t understand but could feel the desperate edge of.
But I wasn’t listening anymore.
The stone beneath me was slick with blood, fresh and old, the stench of iron thick in the air. My breath came fast, shallow, my lungs too small, the walls too close, the weight in my chest too much.
I could hear Darian raging as he fought against his chains. The scrape of metal on stone, the sickening crack of flesh meeting iron as he struggled. “No. Fuck—no!”
Varyth roared, jagged in a way I had never heard from him before. “ISARA!”
The walls around me blurred, the torches flickering weakly, casting long, twisting shadows that stretched like clawed hands.
I pressed the dagger harder. Felt it pierce the skin. My own blood. My own choice.
It will end here.
It will end?—
The shadowsexplodedaround me.
A storm of sound. Of song.
Not words, not truly, but Iheardthem all the same.
A single, resounding command. Not a plea. Not a whisper. A roar. Fierce and endless, the voice ancient and wild and full ofwill.
