A cry tore from my throat as pain shot up my shoulder.
Then, without hesitation, she slammed my head into the icy stream.
Water surged into my mouth, up my nose, as I thrashed and sputtered. My foot was still trapped between the rocks, and I couldn’t escape. Couldn’t breathe.
Just when I thought I’d drown, she yanked me up by the hair, dragging me back into the world of air and pain.
Her fingers tangled cruelly in my soaked hair, tugging it tight against my scalp as she leaned in to me.
“You wicked little viper,” she hissed, her breath hot against my cheek. “Idoknow you. I know all about you. But you… You don’t knowme.”
Her eyes glittered with malice.
“I think you deserve the same punishment you dealt to all your lovers,” she sneered. “Starting with Francesco—the poor stable boy you falsely accused of assault while moaning under him in pleasure. You ruined him. And forthat, I will bring you the worst pain imaginable.”
She shoved me away, and I tumbled backward into the shallows, my shoe still caught. Pain lanced through my ankle like fire. The chill of the water wrapped around me, but it couldn’t cool the terror blazing in my chest.
And then—she vanished.
One breath. Two.
Suddenly, she was there again, her hands clamped around my throat.
I gasped. Her grip tightened. Inhuman. I scratched at her wrists, flailed helplessly as her thumbs pressed into my windpipe.
“You—you’re just like Balthazar!” I rasped, my voice a ragged croak. “You’re amonster!”
She didn’t flinch. Her lips curled.
“And you,” she spat, “shared his bed. Moaned for him.Lovedhim. And now you dare call him a monster? What kind of wretched little traitor must you be to lie even to yourself?”
She flickered again—gone one moment, back the next, each reappearance with her fingers clamping tighter.
My vision went white with panic.
She’s not human. She’s something else. Something worse.
Finally, she let go.
I collapsed into the stream, coughing, gasping, tears mixing with the icy water.
“I… I do love Balthazar,” I choked, each word catching on broken breaths. “With all my heart.”
But even as I said it, I tugged at my foot, yanking with raw desperation. I didn’t care if I tore the tendons. I had to get free—had to escape thisthing.
The woman’s voice slid through the air like poisoned mist, choking the life out of it.
“Yousayyou love him,” she whispered, her form flickering in and out of existence like a flame in the wind, “but all I hear is a hollow echo—thin, pathetic, false. You think your bond matters? You and he hadnothing—nothing like what we shared.”
She materialized inches from my face, her breath ice on my skin.
“Our connection,” she said, trembling with rage and devotion, “was a force that swallowed the stars. Shadows bound us. Devoured by the dark. You? You’re just acheap thrill, a whore who happened to warm his bed.”
The air around us fractured and warped as if it couldn’t bear her fury, like the world was quaking with her grief.
I sat there, soaked to the bone, staring at her as realization dawned like a punch to the gut.
“You’re his first love,” I whispered.
