The chain rattles violently as I’m shoved down. A guard plants a boot between my shoulder blades and grinds me into the marble until my ribs creak. My blood spreads beneath me inpools. I don’t know how I’m still bleeding. I should’ve run dry hours ago. Maybe this is it—what dying looks like. Feels like.
My vision dims again, my pulse stuttering.
Then Sterling steps out from the wings and climbs the steps of the podium.
“This is the new Order. One of structure. Of control. Where chaos like this…” he flicks his fingers at me “…will no longer be allowed to poison the Sovereign from the inside.”
He paces slowly, hands clasped at his back, like a fucking professor giving a lecture.
“This is the end of answering to an outdated council. The end of primitive brutality. We are not barbarians. We are not weapons. We are leaders. Refined. Enlightened.”
The crowd murmurs approval.
My skin crawls.
I try to lift my head. Muscles tremor, failing. I taste blood. Feel it pooling in my mouth, sliding down my chin, soaking my chest.
“But to usher in this new era,” Sterling continues, “we must cleanse ourselves of the past. We must make an example.”
A side door groans open and chains drag along the floor. Alistair is shoved into the hall. He stumbles, wrists bound, face beaten into something that barely resembles what he was. Betrayal sits heavily on his slumped shoulders. Defeat in the bow of his head.
But when his eyes meet mine—there’s apology, regret. There’s the silent understanding of a man realizing too late that the world he served never intended to let him live.
He shakes his head.
And I—I can’t even hate him. Not now.
Not as he’s marched to die for the same man who destroyed me. Alistair gave everything for Sterling, all for a father who planned to bury him alongside me. And this room packed withpolished traitors—they all know it. They all came to watch. To celebrate. To witness the first brick laid in Sterling’s new empire:
My death.
The monster made for killing. The son made for death. And for the first time in a long goddamn time…I feel it.
The end.
My vision swims. The lights overhead bleed into a throbbing, white-hot halo. Everything blurs at the edges—shadows dripping into one another, Sterling’s silhouette smearing across my field of view. All I can really see is the blood pooled across the marble in front of me. Impossible amounts of it.
I don’t even know how many times I was shot. Three? Four? More? It doesn’t matter. The holes blur together now. My ribs grind with every breath. My heartbeat is a weak, fluttering tap against bone.
And Sterling is still fucking talking.
I try to focus on his words, to burn them into my brain so I can find him later in whatever hell I’m headed to and rip out his tongue with my fucking teeth. My chin falls forward, the weight of my skull suddenly impossible. The collar bites deeper into my throat as gravity pulls me down.
Stay awake.
Don’t fucking blackout.
Not yet.
Sterling steps down from the podium and approaches the platform. The room leans with him. Or maybe I’m the one tilting.
“Tonight marks the end of disease. The end of unchecked violence. The end of the Sovereign as it was.”
His shoes stop inches from my blood-soaked knees.
“This is the old world’s last breath.”
I try to lift my head. Try to meet his eyes. But my body refuses. My muscles shake violently, threatening to give out entirely.
