“Are you willing to tell me who?”
His crimson eyes gleamed, the fire in them licking higher at my question. “Not yet.”
“Then what would I have to do to gain your trust?” I asked, even as my instincts screamed at me not to play this game.
Veralin leaned forward, folding his hands like a king preparing a wager.
“It’s simple really.”
I waited.
His next words dropped like daggers.
“Just kill the prince.”
My breath fled me.
“You mean Theron?” I said, trying to hold on to some semblance of rationality.
But he smiled, and I knew the answer before he gave it.
“No. Prince Zander Rayne.”
The air in the room seemed to still, like the shadows themselves recoiled.
I stared at him, unmoving. My voice was razor thin. “You want me to kill Zander?”
“He weakens you,” Veralin said softly. “He binds your power, clouds your judgment. He is the anchor dragging you back to a dying world. Kill him, and your full potential will be yours. No more divided loyalties. No more chains.”
I didn’t respond. Not out loud. But my magic answered.
A cold pulse of refusal that crackled in my blood.
He was wrong about one thing.
Zander Rayne didn’t weaken me.
He was the one who kept me human.
The silence stretched for a breath. Then another.
“No,” I said, my voice calm but ringing like tempered steel. “I won’t kill him.”
Veralin’s smile vanished, carved away as if it had never existed. The temperature in the room plummeted, and his power surged like a storm awakened. The shadows around the black dais twisted and coiled, slithering across the stone like living smoke.
“You would choose him?” His voice was thunder beneath the skin. “The boy who carries the fire meant to destroy us all? The wielder of Dark Fire must die!”
I took a step forward. “Then kill me. Because I’ll never lift a hand against him.”
His fury exploded.
Power lashed from his hands like blackened flame, but Kaelith’s voice rose in my mind,I am with you.
Magic thundered through my veins.
I threw my hands wide, and lightning burst from me like a scream—cracking the marble beneath my feet, splitting the obsidian columns like brittle bones. The walls shook, the ancient stained glass shattered inward, and the dark banners of the Blood Court went up in flames.
The throne cracked in two with a sound like the breaking of fate itself.
