Finnian mustered up some of his divine strength and sped soundlessly across the distance.
He reached out and clasped her wrists. The muscles in her arms flexed, but she was not quick enough. Finnian squeezed her bones and fractured them in his hold.
With a cry, she threw her head back in an attempt to collide her forehead with his. He caught her with both hands wrapped around her skull. She jerked back, but he fastened his grip and prodded his thumbs into each of her eyelids. “Do you think Mira loves you?”
Marina wailed as her eyeballs squished like kiwi underneath the pads of his thumbs. Streams of blood fled down the crevices of her nose.
“You are nothing to her.” He lodged deeper until brain matter pushed underneath his fingernails. “Just like you were nothing to Father.”
Finnian removed his thumbs from Marina’s skull and threw her aside.
She collapsed onto the floor, unconscious.
A greedy power pulsed between the rush of magic and blood against his bones. The high of it swelled in his chest, behind his eyes, with the urge to be ruinous. An urge to rip apart the entire fucking palace and every revolting memory it held of his childhood with Mira.
He snapped his head towards the dais. “One to go.”
Mira was awake now, her drenched silver strands stuck to the sides of her cheeks and neck, the shine of her porcelain complexion faded to the shade of an egg’s shell.
As Finnian advanced, Mira fumbled on her hands and knees up the steps.
The distress shadowing Freya’s expression rearranged into amusement as she watched Mira scramble away. Only this time, Freya was no longer standing on the platform alone. Cassian was beside her, hands stowed away in the front pockets of his suit, a wolfish glint in his golden gaze as he watched Finnian.
The intensity of it didn’t flare any discomfort or annoyance within him. Surprisingly, it sated a distant hunger in him he was unacquainted with. A starvation he did not know existed deep within him until this moment. There was a pride Cassian wore that he could not decode. Heenjoyedthe way Cassian observed him.
Finnian disregarded the feeling and rushed to the steps. He caught the hem of Mira’s gown with the toe of his boot. She jarred backwards. The material ripped up her leg.
Finnian crouched down, eye level with her. “I do enjoy your fear,Mother.” He elevated a hand and fabricated an icicle out of the droplets dampening the material of her gown, frosty air encircling it.
Mira did a double take at the water crystallizing in his grasp. The air around her flared with divine power, its gust rushing across Finnian’s skin and coating his tongue like rotting fruit.With it came a bitter nostalgia of his time in Kaimana, with her divine power lurking in every living entity beneath the sea. He knew the repulsive taste of it well.
Finnian stabbed the spike through the back of her hand, pinning her to the step before she could teleport away.
The charge of her divine power fizzled out.
Her milky eyes flashed up at him, lethal and as sharp as needles. “It appears, after all these years, you are still unaware of your place. I am your mother.”
He tipped his head back in a laugh. It was nonsense. Fucking ignorant words. “I have never considered you a mother. Naia and I deserved far better thanyou.”
Mira flinched at the mention of Naia, as if he reached out and struck her.
She bared her teeth, her expression souring. “Donotspeak of her to me.”
Finnian ground the icicle in between the tendons of her knuckles. “Naia is the queen of my city now.” He could feel the throbbing of his heart rate in his eyeballs; the tautness of his jaw muscles strained down the side of his neck. “She has a family, knows the warmth of love, the strength of power, and not a day goes by where she ever thinks of you.”
That familiar, vibrational hum festered beneath his ears, crawled up the side of his cheek and into his temples. The dissonant thrum in his skull sent a quiver of panic down his chest.
“Butyouhave.” A smirk twisted on Mira’s lips as she leaned forward, disregarding the spike pierced in the back of her hand. “Youplotted my downfall. Tell me, how long did it take to come up with a plan? How much of your energy have I consumed when there has not been a day that I have spared my insolent son a single moment of thought? You are nothing but a foolish request from your father to haveone more child.”
The itch festered behind his eyes, prodding deeper, deeper, deeper. In response, dread infected his bloodstream and fired frantically through his veins.
Somehow, he’d activated the curse. Was it the image of the man and the fireflies from earlier, or the venomous impulse corrupting him as he broke his siblings like old toys?
There was a trembling beneath his skin as the pulsing amplified inside of his head.
This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not when Mira was before him—powerless.
He glared at her—a face with perfectly proportioned features, round eyes the color of her moonstone palace, pooling with spite. Even after losing her title, her kingdom, any hope to break her dreadful curse, none of it had triggered a dose of self-reflection to admit how she’d ended up there. Her massive ego was still intact, and it disgusted Finnian.
