"Because trust was exactly what I was trained to inspire from birth." She knelt beside me, joints cracking in the sudden silence, and for a moment, her carefully constructed mask slipped just enough. I saw the girl I'd thought was my friend, anguished and torn, caught between duty and something that might have been genuine affection. "Every Keeper has a shadow, Aria. Someone raised alongside them from earliest childhood, trained to be their closest companion, their confidant, their mirror. Trained to earn absolute trust and to do what must be done if they fall from grace."
"Your whole life? Your entire existence?—"
"Was devoted to being your perfect friend until the moment I needed to be your executioner." She touched my face with surprising gentleness, fingers cool against my fever-hot skin. "I'm sorry it had to end this way. I'm sorry you chose them over us, over the world. I'm sorry you forced my hand. I'm sorry for so many things I can't even name."
The irony of it, that my blood was pooling in the exact same spot where I'd bled for the Gate every dawn for five long years, where I'd cut my palm with ritualistic precision and let my essence feed the prison, wasn't lost on me even through the haze of pain. But this time, instead of maintaining the prison as I'd done countless times before, my blood was being prepared for something far more permanent, far more terrible.
The Last Seal. The final solution that even the Council spoke of only in whispers. Every drop of divine-touched blood in my veins would be used to forge chains that could never break, never weaken, never fail. Eternal imprisonment made absolute. And then I would be nothing, not even a memory to be mourned, just component parts, my essence scattered and consumed.
Through fading vision, growing dimmer by the second, I saw Master Theron in the doorway, his elderly frame silhouetted against the chaos beyond. His face was white with shock, eyes wide with horror behind his thick spectacles. He still clutched his chest but he started forward with more speed than I'd ever seen from him.
He didn't make it more than a few steps before Natalia raised one imperious hand, and guards materialized to block his path with crossed spears.
"The Order of Truth has no authority here," she said coldly, each word precise as a scalpel cut. "This is Keeper business. Internal affairs. You have no standing to interfere."
"This is murder," Theron spat, his voice shaking with rage I'd never heard from the gentle scholar. "This is an abomination. This is everything we swore to stand against."
"This is necessity. This is duty. This is what must be done to preserve the world, regardless of the cost to our souls."
My blood reached the Gate's base, and the ancient structure roared, not with pain but with hunger, with anticipation, with the satisfaction of a trap finally sprung after waiting centuries. It had been waiting for this moment, I realized with dawning horror. The Gate wasn't just a prison, never had been. It was an altar built on lies and blood, and I was the sacrifice it had been preparing to consume from the moment of my birth, perhaps from the moment the first Pandoros child drew breath.
But as darkness closed in, as Ellie's tearful face became the last thing I could see clearly, I felt something else through the golden threads that bound me to four princes with bonds that transcended flesh and magic.
They weren't just angry anymore.
They were coming.
The seals were failing faster now, my spilled blood accelerating their decay rather than strengthening them asNatalia had planned, the divine essence in my veins feeding the very thing she'd tried to stop. And through our connection, growing stronger even as my body grew weaker, even as my heart struggled to beat, I heard Kaelen's voice like distant thunder rolling across mountains:
We're coming for you. Hold on. Just hold on a little longer. Don't you dare leave us now.
But holding on was getting harder with each heartbeat that pushed more precious blood from my body, with each breath that came shorter than the last. The betrayal hurt worse than the blade lodged between my ribs. Ellie, my only friend in this cold world, had never been my friend at all. Just another weapon aimed at my heart from the beginning.
Everything had been a lie constructed with patient care.
Everyone had been playing a role in a grand deception.
And I was bleeding out on the ancient stones of a cause I no longer believed in, betrayed by the person I'd trusted most in all the world, dying for a lie that had consumed my entire life.
The darkness rushed up to claim me like a wave, inevitable and final, and my last coherent thought was a bitter realization that tasted like ash:
The Keepers had won after all.
But even as unconsciousness took me, dragging me down into the depths, I felt the Wolf's Heart seal crack with a sound like breaking ice, then shatter completely in an explosion of silver light.
And Flynn's howl of pure rage shook the very foundations of the world, promising vengeance and blood.
TWENTY-FIVE
Aria
I felt death reaching for me with cold, patient fingers, but something else reached back with fire and fury and absolute refusal.
Flynn's savage strength flooded my veins, not gentle or careful but violent in its determination to keep my heart beating. Each pulse came like a wolf's snarl, fierce and wild and utterly unwilling to submit. My blood, which should have been draining onto the stone, seemed to reverse course, some of it flowing back into me with supernatural insistence.
Thane's endurance wrapped around my bones like armor, holding together what wanted to fall apart. The knife between my ribs should have been agony, but his strength turned it into something manageable, something I could survive. My body, which should have been failing, found reserves that shouldn't exist.
Elias's rebirth magic danced through my consciousness like phoenix song, keeping my soul tethered when it wanted to flee. Death kept trying to claim me, but he wouldn't let it, couldn't let it, his power making death itself seem like just another state of being to be transcended.
