My accusation is harsh, my voice rising above the wind as I speak to her as if she were awake. “You choose to welcome the oblivionof death.”
With a snarl, I lower my lips to her cheek, growling against her skin. “I, too, have welcomed that oblivion.”
My lips twist, hard, sneering, resolute. “But now that we have entered my kingdom, your fate is no longer yours to choose. You are mine from this moment on, and your life belongs to me.”
Three days ago, she commanded me to come for her when the stars went out. Given that the stars shone most brightly on the night she was born, I reasoned that if the stars were extinguished, it would signal her death.
I reasoned that this moment would come.
But now, I realize that logic… It has no fucking place in this moment.
Logic and strategy can’t help me now.
I press my cheek to Thyra’s, not a gentle touch, a hard one. Demanding. Commanding.
“I am not done with you, Thyra.” Her name tastes bitter on my tongue. “I haven’t even begun. And until I’m done with you, you will endure.”
My command falls heavily in the sliver of space now between her face and mine, a nearness that fills my chest with her scent.
White roses. The kind that could never thrive in my kingdom. The kind that will be crushed.
“Your death is not written in this snow.”
If she is to die, it will be when and howIchoose.
I have one option now—an option I would not have even contemplated if it weren’t for the gleaming runes, the black thread trying to steal her away, and the Oracle’s final…slow…breaths…as she defies me.
An evil option that only a fae as heartless as I am could ever contemplate using.
“You do not get to choose death,” I whisper into her ear. “I won’t allow it.”
Drawing on my Lethian power, I begin to hum again, dragging up another song, but this one is from my darkest memory.
A song far worse than any other.
A terrible, violent melody that embodies only the cruelest, most brutal intentions.
A harmony my mother would not teach me.
So I taught myself.
I learned this song from every death I witnessed. From the faint whisper of every last breath and the lowthudof every final heartbeat and the near-soundless descent of tears down lifeless cheeks.
Now, I wrench the melody up from a memory.
Mymemory of a time when I used this song once before.
A time of pure savagery and extreme pain, a moment filled with screams and blood and pleading cries for mercy…
Mercy I did not give.
And so I begin to sing.
Chapter Ten
Thyra
The darkness deepens.
