“You carry something precious,” he says softly. “A power inside you that I need to access.”
My stomach knots. Does he know that my mother hid our power? Does he know it’s trying to break free?
My fingers curl into fists. “You think I’ll help you?” I snap. “That I’ll stand beside someone who slaughters villages and creates monsters? So you can make everyone bend the knee?”
A grim smile twists across his face, a look of conviction.
“You think too small, Celeste. I don’t care about thrones. I care about reshaping the world.”
“Well, I care about the people who live in it,” I bite out. “And I will never support someone so callous, so malicious, so twisted as to become what you’ve become.”
There’s a beat of silence.
Then he says, almost gently, “You will.”
My breath catches.
“Not because I ask,” he continues. “But because there will come a day when you’ll have no other choice.”
A chill wraps around my spine—not from the room, but from the certainty in his voice.
I grit my teeth hard enough to ache. The pulse in my neck pounds, furious.
I could kill him.
Or at least hurt him enough to incapacitate him.
The thought doesn’t come as a whisper this time; it hits like a blade unsheathed, bright and cold. I see it in my mind as clearly as if I’ve already done it: my energy ripping through him, his body crumpling, the tyranny ending with one, clean strike.
The memory of Mersos rises like a tide—the vines snapping under my command, their sharp recoil. I could snap him just the same. Bone instead of wood.
The buzzing inside me swells, sharp and electric, racing through my chest, into my fingertips. It’s eager. Hungry. My hands twitch with the need to aim, to release.
I lock my eyes on him, already imagining the way he’ll stagger when the force hits, the silence that will follow. The world would be free of him. Dante would be free.Iwould be free.
One heartbeat. That’s all it would take. One heartbeat and—
Movement cuts through the air.
Ella glides forward from the shadows, her deep-red hood catching the light, silver mask gleaming. She tilts her head, like she’s reading every thought in my skull, and then… she hums.
The sound is low, almost intimate, curling into my ears like smoke. At first, it’s nothing—just a note hanging in the air—but then the melody snakes through me, winding into my ribs, my spine, my skull.
The fury dulls. The hunger fades. The buzzing sputters and dies, leaving only emptiness.
My legs weaken. My breath comes shallow, as if the hum has stolen the air itself. My limbs go heavy, sluggish, like they’ve been packed with wet sand.
A siren. My uncle warned me about a siren.
The thought barely forms before my knees buckle. Torbin’s gripcloses around my arms, catching me, keeping me upright.
The humming stops, but the silence she leaves behind feels worse—like she’s carved my power out with a surgeon’s precision and locked it away, just out of reach.
The tsar lifts a hand and gives a dismissive wave. “She’s tired. Take her back to her chamber.”
Torbin bows slightly, his hand still at my elbow.
Despite the weakness pulling me down, I jerk away. “I can walk,” I snap.
