“I’ll do it,” I whispered, the words tasting sour like surrender. The moment they left my mouth, the water began to drain from the tank. Relief should have followed, but it didn’t. There was only a hollow, sickening certainty that I had just chosen the shape of the realms’ loss.
I collapsed into the metal grates in an exhausted heap, my body trembling as the silence rushed in, too late to save what I’d already given away.
“I knew that’s all it would take,” Raoku chided through a grin. No matter the cost, I wouldn’t let them hurt her again. I just couldn’t.
The sealed door creaked open slowly in the glass chamber, and a rolled parchment shoved into my face.
“You’ll sign, and it will magically bind you to the contract. Disobey, and it kills you and your sister on the spot,” the uniformed woman explained.
She placed the paper before me. I tried to rise, but my arms buckled, strength slipping through me before I could hold myself up.A quill flitted through the air and placed itself in between my fingers.
I weakly gripped it and brought it down toward the parchment. Traitor. The second the ink blotched the paper, I’d become one ofthem.
The anger started as a quiet heat beneath my skin, but it didn’t stay that way. It grew, fast and unforgiving, fed by every thought I couldn’t escape. And beneath it, coiling tighter with every second, was guilt—sharp, unrelenting, impossible to ignore. Together, they swallowed me whole. My body shook under it, like I couldn’t contain it, like something inside me was about to snap.
The chamber convulsed as an explosion tore through it, the force slamming into everything in its path.Orders flew from the commander's mouth, guards taking off to investigate the attack. The building shook, the foundation and walls cracking and crumbling. It bellowed again, closer, cracking the glass around us.
“Sign it!” Raoku yelled in my ear, but I shook too violently.
“You. Can. Rot.”
Stone hurled itself across the room, carving through pillars that held the roof in place before obliterating a glass cylinder with a deafening crash.
“What—who is that?” Raoku sputtered, frantically checking his surroundings as the wall behind us crashed to the ground.
I knew. His emotions flitted through me in a ravenous storm. Torvryn chose his name deliberately to remind me. To echo the one I was supposed to remember. The true name of the one who was meant to save us all.
“Rhak’torvain. My Blood Tie.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Raoku shoved my face into the metal bottom of my glass chamber.
“Sign it,” he seethed again, the bone of the bone helm gritting against my cheek under his weight. I pushed upwards, but his knee pressed harder against my spine.
Something shifted as the curse Noctis and I shared lifted, like pressure finally breaking inside my bones. The pain didn’t leave completely, but it no longer owned me. I was still broken from the torture, still barely holding together, but the will to fight clawed its way back through the wreckage.
The marble tiles ruptured, a fault cracking through its center and throwing Raoku from my back. He crashed inches from the fracture in the floor and scrambled to put distance between us. His eyes widened, his mouth falling open before he snapped it shut and rose. He drew his sword, but the blade quivered in his grip, betraying the fear he tried to hide.
I pulled my knees beneath me, the pain that racked my tail now dull in leg form. I fought my way to standing, gripping the nearest glass chamber for balance as the room swayed around me.On wobbling legs, I stared down the commander through the slim opening between the intertwined bones digging into my flesh.
“You do not control me,” I spat, careful not to trigger the helm with the intensity of my voice. “You don’t control anything anymore.”
Raoku snarled. Then, he disappeared in thin air, materializing behind me. His booted foot slammed into my back, agony erupting through my spent body as I crashed to the ground.
I worked to stand again.
I will never yield.
“There is nothing you can do within these walls to interrupt this war.” He kicked my head forward before I could rise fully, knocking the skull helm’s spikes further through the surface of my chest. “You are weak.” He kicked again. “And worthless.” He gripped me by the collar of my wet and bloodied tunic, pulling me into his face. “And we do not need you anyway.”
Noctis was taking too long.
Light tore from Raoku’s palm and crashed into my chest, a burning force that spread through me like liquid fire.I threw myself to the right out of his grip, my body’s feeble attempt at escaping the attack, but I flipped messily.
When I stood on worn feet, Raoku’s blade rested in place of his power against my sternum. He whipped his foot across my ankles, and I plummeted to the floor, his sword following each movement closely.
I can’t fight anymore.
