He’d restored his old glorious form. To any unknowing eye, he looked like the most beautiful and benevolent angel.
“For beings like you, centuries are nothing,” I said, my voice flat. I hadn’t resisted. I hadn’t fought. I gave him no reason to suspect my plan. “A mere blink.”
“Maybe so,” he replied. “But every second without my daughter to nourish me was an eternity. Those empty seconds stretched into an endless famine.”
He reached out to touch my face. I forced my muscles to remain still, fighting the instinct to flinch, or worse, to throw up.My control was my only weapon for now. I had to stay perfectly unmoved to outwit him.
I subtly raised the chains to my chest, a feeble gesture, as if the dark metal binding me could somehow shield me. I forced myself to stillness, warning myself not to let desperation drive my next action. Desperation led to mistakes.
His fingers were icy on my skin, chilling me and terrifying me like nothing else could. Yet I held my ground, refusing to react and set him off.
“Do you know what that is like, daughter? The unbearable loneliness? The sting of betrayal? You abandoned your own father, left me to rot. A decade of your absence left a wound that has yet to heal.”
Each word, a perversion of love, burrowed under my skin like venomous serpents. I knew what would come next after his speech—had lived it too many times to count. He’d feed on me slowly, savoring every drop of blood, every shred of my essence. Then he would break my bones for the marrow and peel me apart to reach the softest, sweetest parts.
I fought the instinct to swallow, a defensive reflex against the rising tide of horror.
Think of something else. Anything else.
Killian’s face surfaced in my mind unbidden. The chaos heir, now king, had always been icy and brutal, until he met me. Then Tyson, who loved me with his fiery dragon heart. I replayed the tender scene of Killian holding me, afraid of letting go after he made love to me.
“You aremine,” Ruin snapped, his voice grating as if he’d caught a glimpse of my memory at my slip. I instantly threw my mental walls up, a staggering effort with the chains muting my power. The void god’s anger flared, his fingers tangling in my hair and yanking my head back. “You have always been mine, daughter. This mate, these friends—I will devour them all. Everyconnection you’ve forged, I will lick the meat from their bones while you watch, until you understand there is only us. There has only ever beenus.”
The words “pure evil” felt inadequate. I tried to block out his words, but his power made them stick like tar in my mind. Without Sy, I couldn’t retreat into the mental fortress we’d built over years of shared suffering. He wanted me fully present. Utterly aware.
“Just get it over with, Ra,” I said, my voice dripping with boredom. I couldn’t stomach another second of his speech. “You can chain me. You can torture me. You can eat me. But I’ll never be yours, just as I was never yours before.”
“That,” he said softly, “is what happens after all these years without a parent’s guidance. We’ll have to correct that.”
He grabbed my chains and yanked. With a flick of his wrist, we sank through the floor into the palace’s depths, the physics of this place bending to his will in a way that hurt to perceive. He dragged me all the way to the feeding chamber.
Not a single detail had changed in a decade.
Stone tables were stained black with layers of old blood—most of it mine, some of it others’. Implements lined the shelves: bone saws, flaying knives, tools for accessing marrow. Ruin could have used just his magic and claws for all his dark deeds, but he loved the drama. He liked his victims to see the instruments of their suffering, to be terrified before the pain even began.
This room had haunted my nightmares for a decade. Every surface was a canvas for memories I’d fought to bury.
A familiar, icy dread seized my limbs as I was forced to revisit this place of horrors. Here, my father hadn’t just fed on me. He’d experimented on me, pushing the boundaries a little further each time, curious to see just when I would finally break. I couldn’t die. I couldn’t escape. But I never broke. Notcompletely. Not with Sy, my brave, savage soul-sister, sharing the terror. A part of me was fiercely grateful she wasn’t here now, to feel this fresh pain, to sob with me in the dark.
“Such lovely memories,” Ruin said fondly, running his fingers over a familiar set of tools. “You were so small when we started. You screamed for days. But you learned to endure. My strong girl.”
I let him talk. I endured the sound of his voice. Bargaining with evil was a fool’s game.
“Do your worst, Father,” I said, the bored tone a shield I refused to drop.
He slid a butcher’s knife between my ribs. He knew the gaps, the soft spaces where a blade could slide without catching bone.
I screamed as blinding pain lit up every nerve ending.
“Yes, daughter, scream for me,” he said with deep satisfaction. I choked it back, silencing myself.
Then, a phantom warmth—the power of the starstone—flared in my blood. Sy wasn’t with me, but my mother was. A sob caught in my throat, not from pain but from her sheer, steel-strong support.
“There we are,” Ruin murmured, peeling back skin with the sick curiosity of a sadistic artist who fancied himself a virtuoso of flesh. “Let’s see what you’ve been hiding.”
And he opened my chest.
My heart, exposed to the foul, icy air, pounded rabbit-quick with terror. He studied it like a jeweler examining a perfect gem, his cold breath misting against my naked, frantic muscles.
