Her chin dropped, then lifted again, this time toward me. I staggered. Her eyes weren’t silver anymore, but endless pools of living mercury, silver-slick and all-knowing. The next words from her throat didn’t simply crawl up my bones, they sank.
“For survival.”
Enough. “Tell me my prophecy, Willa.”
The oil in her eyes went still. And I fell into them.
“Deep, deep, deep it goes, running black within their soul. Innocence and purity must be traded as a whole. For a monster lurks within them, not of soul or mind or blood, but one who whispers kindly—let me in, come undone. Deep, deep, deep it digs, laying claim within their mind, until finally it’s all they see, and the darkness marks them blind.”
My heart fractured. “I know that one—”
But her voice only deepened, warped now.“Yet even nightmares, blind and few, keep truths that run deep, run true. For what fears love, and loves the fear, leaving its mark unseen but clear. Two may be one, yet one can’t be known. Only when they’ve met their match, will the eternal become its own.”
The divination wound around me like a noose, dark and luminous in one devastating sweep.
Fates spare me.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Verena
SOMEHOW, I LEFT WILLA’S CHAMBERS even more confused than when I’d entered. I wasn’t even sure why she’d summoned me at all.
To warn me? Perhaps. But she hadn’t really said what she was warning me of.
Everything about it was vague, blurred. A premonition, yes, but of what degree? That someone close to me would betray me? I almost dared them to try. The truth was, no one left in my circle had any room for secrets.
The sun had begun to set, the only sign being the slate grey clouds fading darker. The incessant knocking had been nothing more than a maid rallying us for dinner. Willa had declined, choosing to take her meal alone. Again. She hadn’t asked me to stay, and I hadn’t pressed. Neither of us had wanted to entertain the bleakness that already felt unwelcome.
The corridor stretched long, amber firelight flicking along the walls as I made my way back to my own room. I paused between two of the dragon-pillars, holding my fingers to the flame poised in their center.
How much blood has stained this very floor? How much grief has been hidden in these walls? Perhaps these statues had been set here as more concealment than beauty, ornaments to hide what even rebuilding could not erase.
The bond pulled, a warmth drawing through my chest, down into my bones.
I didn’t know where I was going, only that I needed the air, the quiet, more than I needed a destination. I stopped when the corridor lent me a mirror, its frame half fused with the wall, varnished by centuries of passing hands.
For a heartbeat, I didn’t recognize my own reflection. Silks clung to my curves, baring enough to leave questions unspoken. My curls framed my face, my eyes brighter, more alive. My skin glowed, polished as though burnished by dawn.
But I wasn’t dawn. I wasn’t light.
While my friends still hid somewhere in a forest of petrified bark and bone, this radiant stranger stared back, pretending to be me.
The image shattered, my glamour peeling away from my skin at a whisper as midnight slid over my fingers, racing up my arms in a slow crawl of liquidshadow. They leaked over my shoulders and throat until iron kissed my jaw. Thin veins of cracked black splintered outward from my eyes, creeping across my cheeks, threading around my skull like a crown of unholy dusk.
The darkness laughed in my head.Beautiful,it taunted.
I couldn’t look away from the mirror, from what I was becoming. From what had already stolen me.
A voice came low, through a door warped with age—Ronan’s office. “I fear no man whose flesh can burn.”
I crept forward, pressing my ear to the frame.
Another voice answered, worn with kindness. Aero. “What about women?” he asked. “They don’t scare you?”
Silence, a moment stretched long enough to choke me, then Ronan said, “Only one.”
The bond ignited, a flare that roared down my spine and into my lungs until my knees nearly buckled.
