Hadrian’s additional combat experience showed itself in every movement. He blocked, countered, twisted away from my strikes with brutal efficiency. We collided again and again, talons and fists and wings slamming into stone, the chamber shaking with each blow.
Behind us, the entity roared, and the sound rattled through my bones.
Hadrian drove his claws into my ribs, and I staggered, white-hot pain flaring through me. He followed immediately, slamming me to the ground and pinning me under his weight.
Something inside me snapped.
I surged upward, throwing him off, claws raking across his chest as I rose to my full height. Fire burned low in my throat, restrained only by the fact that Artemis was still in the room behind me.
I would not risk her.
We crashed together again, trading blows that would have shattered lesser beings. He was winning. I could feel it. Eachmovement cost me more than it cost him. Each mistake weighed heavier.
But I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. My people needed this to end. Artemis needed this to end.
I dug deeper than my training went. Deeper than my pride went. I dug into the place where duty and love braided together until there was no separating them.
I wasn’t doing this for power. I was doing this so no one else ever had to stand where I was standing.
Hadrian lunged.
I met him head-on.
We collided in a brutal clash that sent us skidding across the stone, the chains behind us screaming as the entity strained against them.
I rose first.
Blood dripped from my jaw. My muscles shook. My vision swam.
But I was still standing.
26
ARTEMIS
Arthur slammed into Hadrian again, stone cracking under the impact, and my heart lodged somewhere behind my ribs and refused to move.
I couldn’t just stand here and watch.
I tried. I really did. But every hit Arthur took felt like it landed in my own body, and standing there screaming his name was not going to save him. My brain did what it always did when terror crested too high.
It grabbed for information.
The journal thumped against my back as I ran, dodging the edge of the fight, the hiss of fire, the echo of claws on stone. I was suddenly very glad for my water-resistant leather pack.
I ducked behind a fallen column, ripped the book free, and flipped it open with shaking hands.
Please. Please. Say something useful.
The language blurred at first. Ink and symbols and half-poetic nonsense that felt designed to keep its meaning just out of reach. I skimmed hard, skipping anything that felt like ritual or genealogy, hunting for structure. For patterns. For cause and effect.
Something slammed into the wall behind me. I flinched, crouched lower, and forced myself to keep reading.
I remembered something I had read previously.
Power is never born, only moved.The heart directs the current.
My pulse roared, and I looked up.
