As ifsheheard me.
I turn away from the dome and stride toward the armory, toward my brothers, toward the war we’re about to wage.
The Seelie Court has no idea what’s coming.
But they will.
They’ll learn what it means to take something from a dragon who’s finally foundcontentment.
They’ll learn the price of touching what’smine.
And they’ll pay for it in blood, screaming, and the ashes of their empire.
Tonight, we ride to war.
And I get my girl back.
No matter the cost!
Chapter Twenty-Three
ROXY
I wake to darkness that isn’t darkness at all.
Above me, the ceiling stretches impossibly high, and I realize it’s not a ceiling but the night sky, captured and crystallized into arching vaults of ice so clear I can see individual stars frozen mid-twinkle in their depths. The walls pulse with that same impossible starlight, veins of silver and deep indigo threading through translucent frost that shouldn’t exist outside of fever dreams or children’s fairy tales. Everything gleams with cold luminescence, like someone took the aurora borealis and forged it into architecture, each surface reflecting and refracting light until the entire space seems to breathe with captured constellations.
I push myself upright, and my breath clouds white in air so frigid it burns going down. The floor beneath me isn’t stone or wood but something smooth and glassy, shot through with threads of frozen starlight that pulse in patterns I can’t quite follow. When I press my palm against it, the cold sears straight through skin and muscle to bone, leaving behind an ache that radiates up my arm in waves. It’s not the delicate cold I get when Raze touches me—this shit is arctic.
But this isn’t Earth.
This can’t be Earth.
We went through the portal, reality folded sideways, and now I’m somewhere else, somewhere that operates on rules I don’t understand, in a fortress built from materials that shouldn’t exist.
My mother is a witch. I grew up knowing magic was real, watching her brew potions in our kitchen, seeing her callstorms when she was angry. But I kept my distance from all that, chose photography over spellwork, chose normalcy over the supernatural world she inhabited with such casual ease. I rejected the legacy she wanted me to embrace, moved away, and built a life that hadnothingto do with magic, curses, or creatures that shouldn’t exist. Until she pulled me back in.
And now I’m trapped in a palace made of frozen starlight, held prisoner by something that looks like a man but moves like glaciers shifting, and I can’t evenbeginto process what that means.
The iron chains around my wrists burn with familiar agony, the same kind of chains Raze used on me when I first stumbled into his world. These feel heavier, though, older, woven through with enchantments that make my skin crawl and my half-trained magic recoil from even trying to manifest. They’re not just binding my body, they’re dampening something inside me, smothering the wild violet energy I’ve only just started to understand.
I test the chains anyway, pulling against them with every ounce of strength I possess. The iron bites deeper, burning through layers of skin until I smell my own flesh charring. I grit my teeth and pull harder, refusing to give in to the pain, refusing to accept that I’m helpless.
The chains won’t budge.
Footsteps echo across the frozen floor, each step ringing with crystalline precision that makes the walls shimmer and pulse. I look up, and there he is, the Seelie Prince, moving through his fortress with the kind of confidence that comes from millennia of unchallenged power. He’s beautiful in that disturbing way that makes my mind scream warnings even as my eyes try to make sense of features too perfect to be natural. Moonlight hair, eyes like winter ice, armor crafted from what looks like solidified starlight and frosted silver.
Everything about him is calculated to inspire awe.
All I see is the creature who dragged me away from Raze, who tore me out of the clubhouse while my dragon roared my name.
“You’re awake,” he observes, voice carrying musical undertones that make the air vibrate. “Good. We have much to discuss, little witch.”
I don’t respond. I simply stare at him with every ounce of defiance I can summon, channeling every lesson learned from weeks of captivity, from every moment spent refusing to break under pressure from creatures who thought I was too human to matter.
He smiles, and it’s the kind of smile that promises cruelty disguised as kindness. “I have a proposal for you—”
“How about you go fuck yourself?” I snap back, cutting him off.
