Terror was always her true craving. Power, her obsession. She would devour both if she could, as if they were infinite. Glut on them like wine until they leaked from her pores.
Though, neither was accessible to her while she had no soul-born magic.
Which was why she needed Ronan, why he was there. They were using each other. And either both or neither would survive it.
Tortured screams shuddered through the ground beneath them.
Ronan glanced down, fixating on the cracked floor, willing to see through it. “Seems you’re already spreading terror,” he rasped, glare locking on hers.
She only grinned, leading him deeper into the fortress until they came upon a steel-bar door, an unnatural chill leaking through its seams where she halted before it.
A faint, rusted stench wound over him when she turned, tracing a finger down the line of his throat, then dragged it lower, over his chest.
His breath did not falter. But hers did when his hand shot up, seizing her wrist before she could rip cloth, or flesh. “Aren’t you?”
Laying her free hand atop his, she smiled, leaning into him. “Let me have my fun, while you have yours.”
Ronan pulled back, severing the contact. “What is your plan? I kill the Viper for you. You get the Kaida. But for what, Isolde?”
She whispered, “You already know.”
The air split with a screech, iron against stone, where a skeletal witch emerged through the door, bowing low.
Isolde moved to slip from his hold, but his hand clamped tighter on her arm. Knuckles white. Grip unyielding. This time,hedid not let her go. The witch gasped, rotted teeth gnarling against her sunken jaw.
“Ah, but you are a witch,” Ronan said. “Where most have one plan, you have many.”
Isolde laughed, uncurling his fingers from her arm before sneaking free and drifting past the steel door. “So dubious.” Her voice trailed like incense down the stairwell. “A trait from your father, maybe?”
Fury snapped in his chest. “You do not speak of him.”
With a flick of her wrist, she beckoned him onward, into the womb of darkness.
His gut twisted, yet still, he followed, his leash tightening with every step.
It lilted like a lullaby when her voice came, echoing down the throat of the stair. One sung beside a grave—
“A sickness will rampage with death as desire, a blindness inside that leaves none the wiser.” The walls pressed close, wet with rot. He shivered. She did not. “Deep, deep, deep it goes—” She giggled, as though mocking his skin where the mark seared into it.
A reminder of why he was bound to her.
He paused when she dissolved completely into the dark, only the linger of her voice droning off the walls.
The bloodoath pulsed at his wrist and he knew the twin mark on hers burned in answer. A tether of power and promise. That if Ronan fulfilled the prophecy, if he killed the Viper, she would regain her magic, all of it. And in return, she would set Ryuu free of an heir, release him from the throne. And give him the one other desire he needed most.
The truth.
Even knowing witches were deception wrapped in flesh. Even knowing her kind wove names from lies and worse, still, he had sworn the vow.
Because the curse was not just a threat toherbloodline. But fated to be the one true threat to their entire world.
And Ronan, forged strictly for destruction and death, was destined to kill the one who held it.
There was movement, a flicker in the dim, and she was there, forming back together in front of him like the shadows were done with their play.
A stench thickened, like rotting copper and curdled blood. It scraped down Ronan’s throat as Isolde pushed through another door.
From beyond it rose the sound he had heard above, groans that vibrated loud enough to bellow through stone, wails clawing the walls, pleading for mercy.
