Her soul did not call to mine.
A shadow blade materialized in my palm at my summons. I pressed its edge to her throat before I realized who was in my bed.
Morrigan stared back at me.
My trusted second. In my bed. In my arms. Wearing my mate’s scent like a costume.
Rage seared my chest.
“Morrigan,” I snapped as I dismissed the shadow blade. “What the hell are you doing in my bed?”
“I healed you,” she said, her voice tight and wounded. “I purged Hera’s poison from your veins. You finally woke up because of me.” Her eyes held a bitter edge. “Not even a thank you?”
“Thank you,” I said, my voice flat and cold as a grave. “Where’s Bloom?”
The pause before she spoke stretched thin, then snapped.
“She didn’t make it.”
Four words.
The cold that flooded me was deeper than any curse.
I was out of the bed before my thoughts could catch up. My hand locked around Morrigan’s throat, lifted her, and slammed her into the wall.
Death hummed in my fist, unforgiving and hungry. It wanted release. Wanted to tear her apart and send her screaming into the void.
I held it back. Barely.
“Talk,” I commanded. “Now.”
“She’s gone,” Morrigan choked out. My grip didn’t loosen. “She won’t come back this time. It’s over, Hades. You have to move on.”
“Move on?” As if the love that had sustained me for eons could be shed like a worn coat.
“You couldn’t before,” Morrigan continued, her chest heaving up and down. “Because there was always one more reincarnation. One more chance. But the Fates said the hundredth would be her final life. No more cycles. No more game. No more suffering. A clean cut.” Her eyes searched mine, desperate, pleading. “I know it’s hard. I know it hurts. But you’ve endured this loss before. You can survive it one more time.”
My hand clenched. Her face flushed dark. Still, she didn’t struggle. She just stared, that searing mix of lust and longing and pain in her gaze.
And I felt nothing for her suffering. Nothing but cold contempt.
I could only feel my mate’s pain. Always. Only ever hers.
“How?” The word scraped out. “How is she gone?”
“She persuaded me to go to that French town.” Morrigan’s voice remained steady, too steady, despite the pressure on her throat. The calm of a rehearsed lie. “To get the plant. The only thing that could counter Hera’s curse. We found it, but there was an ambush waiting. Minor gods. Dozens of them.”
I listened. I cataloged every word, every detail.
“I fought for her,” Morrigan said. “I tried. But I couldn’t hold off that many. One of them got a blade into me. When I woke up…” She swallowed against my grip. “They were gone. She was gone.”
My heart burned, a peeling agony, as if my chest had been split open and the center of my heart sawed through with a dull blade. I’d lived in terror for my mate this entire lifetime, knowing that once she was gone, it would be over forever.
One hundred lives. And on the last one, I’d failed her anyway.
“You should never have taken her out of the academy,” I snarled and hurled Morrigan across the room. “I entrusted you with her safety. With the one thing that matters more than my own existence. And you failed.”
She slid down the far wall, crumpling to the floor like a broken doll. But then she pushed herself up, brushed off her clothes, and stood to face me.
