I don’t mean to do it. They just erupt. Foot-long spikes of living wood punching through his armor like cloth. He looks down at his chest. Looks back up at me.
The light leaves his eyes before he hits the ground.
My hand is still raised. Still crackling with green-gold light.
Huh.
More attackers pour from the trees. I lose myself in the rhythm of combat. Duck, strike, kill. The thorns respond to thought now, erupting wherever I need them. My new body moves differently than my old one. Faster. Stronger. I don’t have time to think about what that means. I’m just thankful as fuck that I can keep up.
A scream cuts through the battle, human, not Fae, and I spin toward the sound.
That’s when I see him.
He’s standing at the edge of the tree line, directing the attack with hand signals I know better than my own heartbeat. Tactical vest. Combat boots. The same steel-gray hair he’s had since I was seven years old.
Colonel Marcus Graves.
My feet are moving before my brain catches up.
Kieran shouts something. I don’t hear it. Don’t care. There’s only one thing in this forest that matters right now, and he’s standing at the tree line directing my people to their deaths.
Through the chaos of battle, past the bodies and the blood and the screaming, my eyes lock on the man who made me.
Who broke me.
Who sold me to monsters and called it patriotism.
He sees me coming. His eyes widen. Probably noting my height, my ears, my hair. And the ivy.
The fear that flashes across his face pleases me.
“Ash.” He says my name like it still belongs to him. “You’ve changed.”
“You have no idea.”
I hit him with everything I have.
Not thorns. Not magic. Just my fist connecting with his jaw hard enough to send him sprawling. He hits the ground and I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms, hands wrapped around his throat.
“Twenty-eight years.” The words come out raw. Scraped. “You used me to hunt my own people.”
“You were an asset.” He’s not even sorry. His eyes hold nothing but cold calculation, even now. I’ll never find warmth in these eyes that only hold strategy. “The most valuable asset I ever acquired. Do you have any idea what you could have been? What we could have accomplished together?”
“I know exactly what I could have been.” I lean closer. “I could have been a queen. A daughter. A person with a family who loved her. Instead, I was your weapon.”
“Sentiment.” He spits the word. “I made you strong. I made you useful. Everything you are, the skills, the survival instincts, the ability to kill without hesitation, you owe to me.”
“You’re right.”
I smile.
His expression flickers, uncertainty bleeding through his arrogance.
“I do owe you.” I loosen my grip on his throat. Just enough for him to hope. “I owe you for every mission where I came home covered in blood that wasn’t mine. For every nightmare I still have about the things you made me do. For every time I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the monster staring back.”
“Ash—”
“Did you know what I was? The whole time?”
