It felt like tearing skin from bone.
Across the ruined field, through smoke and rain and bodies still burning where they fell, I found him. The Ember Court king stood there, fire drawn tight around him now, uncertain for the first time.
I laughed.
It ripped out of me sharp, broken and wrong.
“You fucking bastard,” I said, my voice carrying without effort, layered with thunder and something deeper, older. “You thought you could take me.”
Silver lightning gathered overhead, screaming low and hungry, the air crushing down until it was hard to breathe.
“You aimed at me,” I went on, tears blurring my vision, rage and grief twisting together until I couldn’t tell them apart. “And you tookhiminstead.”
My chest burned. My hands shook. I didn’t stop.
“You took what was mine,” I said, the words coming out raw, scraped straight from my lungs. “Do you have any idea what that cost me?”
I stepped forward, power coiling tight and obedient around my bones.
“Now I’m going to takeeverythingfrom you.”
The sky answered.
Lightning came down like the wrath of every storm that had ever existed, silver and blinding, striking him dead center. The ground split. The air screamed. There was no time for him to react, no breath left to give.
When the light faded, there was nothing where he had stood.
Nothing but scorched earth in his place.
Chapter 46
Stillness
CAELIRA
The storm did not stop.
I turned back to Atlas as the battlefield reeled around us, my knees finally giving out as I collapsed beside him, hands shaking so badly I could barely touch him. Power still cracked through the air, the world torn open by what I had chosen to do.
I pressed my forehead to his, sobbing now, the sound ugly and uncontrolled.
“Breathe,” I begged. “Please. Please fucking breathe!”
The storm roared with me, wild and relentless, as if it would tear the sky apart just to give him back to me.
Epilogue
And somewhere beyond the quiet, the storm waited to rise again.
Bonus Chapter
JOREN
I was asleep.
Which means I was innocent. And because I was innocent, the universe chose violence.
Something slammed hard enough to rattle my window, vibrate the floor, and make my candle snuff itself out in what I can only assume was self-preservation.
