She dragged her nail, a cruel crescent against my skin until a bead of red slid down, tickling my collarbone.
“Tick, tick, tick, soon your blood will stain black.” She laughed, glancing back at Ronan. “Tell her, or I will.”
“The oath is void,” Ronan snapped.
Isolde let out a sneer of laughter. “An oath cannot be void. It’s fulfilled, or it kills you. And since we’re both standing here, still breathing…” She tilted my chin higher, the pressure sharp. “Whatis that oath you promised me?”
Blood slid down my neck in a thin, hot line as my hands shook against the chains. My mind clawed down the bond, searching for him.
He was there. But for the first time, Ronan was trembling as his confession came at last. “To kill the Viper.”
My knees gave way, the room vanishing into a single ringing note. Even the chains around my wrists felt distant, like I was sinking through them, like I no longer occupied my own skin. Isolde shoved me down further, my palms hitting the cold ground and staying there.
I couldn’t fight, my mind folded inward, a closing door, that single sentence echoing like a death knell.To kill the Viper. To kill me.
She prowled toward Ronan. “That’s right. You can’t even raise a hand against me. You’d watch while I gut her and do nothing.” She pressed her palm to his shoulder, forcing him down, the posture cruelly close to a kneel.
Then she turned back, crouching so that her shadow fell across my face. “Such a shame,” she said.
Through the static swallowing me, his voice cut through, “Verena.” A command wrapped in desperation. “Look at me. Listen to me.” The bond flared with his will, his fury, his refusal to let me disappear as his eyes locked on mine. “From the moment I saw you everything shifted.Everything. And not in the village, not that day.” His throat worked, swallowing back whatever tried to break free. “I knew long before that I could never kill you.”
He didn’t reach for me with his hands. He reached deeper, slipping past my skin, past the home of my curse, straight for the locked place I’d kept hidden. But my shields were sealed. Even to him.
“You could have been exactly who they said you were,” he continued, “and I still wouldn’t have raised that dagger. Not my smoke. Not my wrath.” The tremor in his words cracked something inside me that even Isolde’s whistle hadn’t touched. “Do you know why?”
I didn’t answer.
“Because you think you’re only the danger hiding in the dark,” his head shook once, twice, “but you’re wrong. I would tear the world apart, piece by piece, to show you your worth. But if it’s the darkness you want to be, then I am your slave within it.”
My heart skipped a beat, then another.
“I was never faithful to Isolde. Even with the oath. She thinks I gave her the Kaida. But they’re safe. They’ve always been safe with me. Just like you have.”
Elysian lurched up, chains clanging against the ground as he forced a step forward. “What the hel have you been—"
“Mimics.”
Elysian and I looked at her at the same time, but Isolde was only watching me, that void-dark stare pinning me in place.
“I realized he was playing me quite early,” she spat. “And that misstep will cost him everything.” She moved closer, closing Ronan off from my view until it was only her consuming my focus. “I’ve heard so many names for you,Viper.”
Her voice turned lilting as if she were reciting a nursery rhyme. As if she weren’t the same damn thing but worse.
“What shall you be when you perish—the orphan?” She tilted her head, the grin widening. “The dragon’s pretty pet? She leaned in, shadows shivering along the floor. “You still don’t know where you came from.Whoyou came from. Why youmustdie.” Her eyes glinted with something like triumph as she turned, a finger pointing in the air with cruel precision, like she’d been waiting years to peel the truth open. “All because they wanted to spareher.”
The words didn’t hit all at once, they dripped, they poisoned. I followed the gesture through the grim as it sliced a path straight to—
“No—” Elva’s voice broke as she stood tall, stood brave, eyes wide enough that the truth had reached her long before it reached me.
My stomach dropped so hard it felt like I was falling through the world. “Elva,” I breathed.
Her body twisted, as if she could slip from the grip holding her. But the man’s hand only tightened. The other lifted his helmet—peppered hair, cropped to the scalp. A face once young and sculpted, now worn, and lined from decades of deceit. And brown eyes I had once trusted.
Elva shook her head, lurching away from his touch. “Fritz?”
Her voice shattered into a thousand small pieces. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t. “Why?”
For a heartbeat, his eyes lowered, softening only for her. “Because doing nothing cost me everything before.”
