“Who is holding me?”
It filled my skull, brittle and quivering with centuries of torment. Not an echo—a cry. A plea.
“Lazarus,” I said, my voice flat, steady, though my chest felt carved hollow.
The pulse quickened.
“Please… give my son my book,”she whispered—Marianna Lorian, her voice fragile, breaking apart inside my head like shattered glass.“Please, Lazarus. Give it to Salvatore. He will free me. I want to see him, feel him, hear him. I was stripped away from him the moment he was born. I was denied my child. Please… give my son my book.”
Her words cut through me like claws—not with pity, not with sorrow—but with something far crueler.
Rage.
I felt it rise inside me.
I thought of how all of this began.
The prison. The chains. The trials.
All of it—because of Salvatore.
Amara, too, was dragged into this hellhole because of him. She had been taken for helping me, beaten and bound in Severen’s den, made to bleed for a sin that was never hers.
None of this—none of it—would have happened if Salvatore had not done what he did.
Orin and Rian’s screams still echoed in my mind.
My mother’s body, pale and still.
Amara’s wrists were bruised from shackles.
The pit that tore me apart.
The shadows that hollowed me out.
All of it—because of him.
And now Marianna wanted me to give him this? A chance to hold her, to know her? To be reunited with the mother he never remembered.
No.
He didn’t deserve her.
He deserved to fester in the emptiness he left me in.
Just as he had taken everything from me, I would take this from him. Forever.
My jaw locked as I pressed Marianna’s tome to my chest. The leather pulsed, a weak heartbeat trembling beneath my palm. Inside, her voice quavered—desperate, pleading, endless.
“Lazarus, please?—!”
“I will not,” I whispered. “He will never have you. He will never know you. He will be without you forever, just like he took my mother away from me.”
The shadows hissed with laughter, their pleasure curling through my blood like black fire.
I turned away, her cries fading to a ghost in my skull, but my decision held.
Salvatore would never be given the chance.
