"Dismissed," Natalia said, her tone indicating the matter was settled. "Return to your duties. Watch her carefully. Report any changes, no matter how small. Any conversation with the princes. Any fluctuation in the Gate's stability. Any sign that her loyalty wavers further."
The Council filed out in silence, but Natalia remained behind, standing by the hourglass as purple sand fell grain by grain. When the heavy chamber door closed with a boom that echoed through stone, she spoke to the seemingly empty room.
Or directly to me.
"Your mother thought she was clever too, Aria." Her voice carried through the stone like she stood beside me in the narrow shaft, like she could see me trembling in the darkness. "Thought she could find another way, a compromise that would satisfy everyone. A path between duty and desire that no onehad walked before. She died believing she'd failed, died with my name on her lips, begging for another chance." A pause, heavy with memory. "But she didn't fail—she simply delayed the inevitable. You'll make the same choice she did, in the end. Duty over desire. Order over chaos. The known over the unknown. Because that's what we are, what we've always been. That's what it means to be Pandora's daughter."
She moved toward the door, each footstep deliberate and final, but paused at the threshold.
"Fourteen days, Aria. Make them count."
The door closed with finality, the sound reverberating through stone and bone alike, leaving me alone in the suffocating darkness of the maintenance shaft. My hands shook as I carefully backed out, each movement feeling too loud, too obvious, certain that guards would be waiting at every turn. By the time I reached my quarters, navigating by instinct through corridors I knew better than my own face, my entire body trembled with rage and fear in equal measure, the two emotions warring for dominance until I couldn't tell them apart.
Two weeks. They'd given me two weeks before they drained my blood to forge an eternal prison, before they unmade everything I was and turned me into mortar for their sacred duty.
Unless I broke first. Unless I chose the princes openly, gave them the excuse they needed to act immediately, to declare me corrupted beyond redemption.
Or unless I found a third option, something neither they nor the princes expected. Something no one had planned for.
Through the Gate's connection, that constant awareness that hummed in my blood now, I felt the princes' awareness of my distress. They'd heard everything through me, experienced it as I had. Thane offered comfort wrapped in shadows and understanding. Killian offered rage hot enough to burn theworld. Elias offered cold, calculated vengeance. Flynn offered power, raw and devastating, enough to destroy those who threatened me. For a moment, just a heartbeat, I considered accepting it all. Letting them burn through me like wildfire through drought-dry grass, turning the Council to ash before they could act on their terrible plans.
But that's what Natalia expected. What she'd planned for, prepared for, perhaps even hoped for.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to think through the fear that threatened to drown rational thought. Fourteen days to stabilize something that couldn't be stabilized, that grew worse with every breath I took. Fourteen days to prove my loyalty to people who'd already decided I was expendable, who were already measuring my veins for their final purpose. Fourteen days to choose between my prisoners and my captors, when both sides saw me as nothing more than a tool to be used and discarded.
Unless I chose myself.
The thought came unbidden, dangerous and thrilling in equal measure, like standing at the edge of a cliff and contemplating flight instead of fall. What if I didn't play their game at all? What if I refused to be either loyal Keeper or corrupted liberator? What if I found my own path, carved my own destiny from the ruins of their plans, one that neither the Council nor the princes had prepared for or anticipated?
I had fourteen days to figure out how to survive both sides of this ancient war.
Fourteen days to become something neither keeper nor queen, neither prisoner nor jailer.
Fourteen days to break every rule I'd been taught since childhood and forge new ones from the ashes of the old world.
The purple sand fell through the hourglass three levels below, counting down to an execution they'd already decided on, a sacrifice they'd already justified to themselves.
But they'd made one critical mistake.
They'd let me hear their plans. They'd shown me the blade before swinging it.
And now I knew exactly how much time I had to destroy everything they'd built.
TWENTY
Aria
The Threshold consumed me the moment my hands touched the Gate, pulling me in with a hunger that felt deliberate, purposeful, almost sentient in its eagerness. No gradual transition this time, no gentle dissolving of reality into the in-between space, just violent, brutal yanking through dimensions that left me gasping and disoriented, sprawled inelegantly on the not-ground of that impossible space where physics held no meaning and reality bent to the will of its inhabitants.
Flynn dominated every inch of it.
Not circling the perimeter like before, not prowling the shadowy edges with that predatory patience I'd come to recognize. He simplywasthe space, his presence filling the void so completely, so absolutely, that breathing felt like drowning in his essence, like trying to inhale water instead of air.
The usual chaos of the Threshold, that swirling, ever-shifting tapestry of emotion and memory and divine power, had been replaced by something far more primal, far more focused. Shadows with teeth prowled the edges. Moonlight that cut like silver blades slashed through the darkness. The smell of deep forest and the wild hunt and things that existedbefore civilization decided wildness was something to be tamed, controlled, chained, permeated everything.
"They're going to kill you."
The words hit like a slap to the face, blunt and brutal and stripped of any pretense. He stood directly in front of me, materializing from the darkness so suddenly I hadn't seen him move, close enough that I had to crane my neck back to meet those burning amber eyes. No preamble, no careful stalking, no games or strategies, just truth delivered with the merciless directness of a predator who'd lost all patience with stalking prey that refused to run.
