“You promised me the last drop of the old magic you’ve been carrying,” he said, his fingers tracing the ventricles. “Where is it? Where is my prize?”
Shield your mind.Lilith’s final instruction echoed, a ghost in the machinery of my will.Make him see what he wants to see. What you choose to show him.
The remnant of the Seed of Heaven seared my marrow, a divine poison meant to kill a god. It couldn’t send Ruin to true death, but it would paralyze him long enough for me to finish this. During the first bride trial, the druid, who’d been Lilith’s pawn back then, had forced it into me. It had nearly unmade me before Killian helped purge the worst of it. I had secreted away a final, lethal dose, burying it deep for this very moment.
The chains dampened my power but could not cut it off completely. I’d absorbed the fallen star, after all. Her abilities flowed through my veins, including her supreme gift for illusion. With pronounced concentration, I wove false memories. I let him glimpse how the “old magic” had settled into my bones, feeding him the lie, bite by careful, calculated bite.
He was already deep in my world of illusion when he crashed through my mental shields, believing I was desperately trying to conceal the prize.
“There,” he gasped with unholy glee. “That is where you’re hiding it.”
“No!” I cried out, layering my voice with pure, desperate terror.
“Clever girl. Bad daughter. Trying to hide it from me. Did you think I would not sense its power?” he demanded, triumph ringing in every word.
“Please, Father!” I begged, shaking my head like a rag doll. “Don’t take it from me! It’s all I have left. If you ever cared for me at all, spare me this! I can’t bear to part with it. I can’t!”
“I thought you were above begging, my daughter,” he mused, a predator toying with his meal.
“I will beg, Father, just this once,” I wept, the picture of shattered desperation. “If you take the last drop of the old magic, I will have nothing! All these years, it has sustained me. It made me strong. It made me smart. It made me bold.”
“And then you fled your own home, fled your loving father!” he hissed, his eyes bleeding to pure, depthless black.
“Forgive me, Father!” I sobbed harder, a string of saliva dripping from my chin. “Please! Don’t take it…”
He selected a bone saw, testing its edge with a thumb.
“It is foolish to keep playing at being a doctor,” he declared and tossed the saw aside. It clattered on the stone.
Instead, claws slid from his fingers. He thrust them deep into my thigh, cutting through muscle and spreading tissue to expose the bone beneath. I screamed my throat raw. I couldn’t help it as he cracked me open like a crab leg.
Lilith’s strength flowed into me once more. I bit back the next shriek, swallowing it down.
It will be over soon. It will. It will,I chanted in my mind, a desperate mantra against the waves of agony.It won’t be like before.
Before, Sy and I had no one but each other, and we’d screamed into empty space for years, with no hope of an answer.
Now, Killian was probably tearing apart dimensions to find me. The other heirs would be right behind him.
They would come. They would find me.
I just had to last long enough to matter. Last long enough to strike back.
Ruin drank my blood and sucked the marrow from my bones, feeding like a connoisseur. Each pull was calculated for maximum extraction, a vile sacrament. I felt my life force flowing into him, my very self diminishing with his every swallow. The room grew cold, or perhaps the coldness was already in every atom of my being.
Stay awake,Lilith had warned.You must feel every moment, no matter how hard it is. No matter how your every instinct screams for you to run, to forget, or to sink into oblivion in order to escape the terror.
So I fought the rising blackness. My heartbeats came slower, each one a distant, labored drum.
A little longer. I just had to hang on a little longer.
I’d once used the chicken-and-egg loop to fend off Lilith in her terrain. I could use the same paradox to make Ruin lower his guard. Any second now, he would take the Seed, and I couldn’t allow him to sense its true nature and spit it out.
“What came first?” I whispered, my voice fraying. “The chicken or the egg?” Then I began the debate with myself, layering the voices like a fractured performance.
“The egg came first,” argued a high-pitched, girlish voice from within me—Barbie A. “Without the egg, there could be no chicken. The first chicken was hatched from an egg.”
“Nonsense,” countered a lower, huskier tone—Barbie B. “There had to be a chicken first to lay the egg. But what did that first chicken even look like? And what of us? Did humans simply come from monkeys? I don’t think so. Do you?”
