Page 186 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

I felt the humming sensation of raw magic building from the three mages clustered near the tunnel’s mouth. Assembly-trained. They wouldn’t attack first. They’d shield themselves long enough to allow everyone else around them to die first, so they had time to devise a plan.

It wouldn’t save them.

A flick of will coaxed sharp edges out of the dark. They skewered the hands of the first man on the ladder, the one who’d said she could be broken. I watched him fall in slow motion, body crumpling to the rough floor below with a sickening thud. The next man on the rungs had just enough time to look down before he hit the ground beside him.

There was no deliberation in my brutality. Only the absolute and total annihilation of anything in this world that thought it could put that sentence in the same breath as her name and continue existing.

The first soldier to spot me in the dark died instantly. I found the gap in his guard and drove a conjured blade through it before he could shout.

No slowing.

My focus remained fixed on the bright spot of moonlight I felt with every fiber of my being, waiting somewhere above us. I couldn’t see well enough to take out everyone at once, not without using the reserve of magic I’d need to protect Luna above.

A man to my right lifted his sword. A lash of blackness hooked his wrist and turned it inward, guiding the edge across his throat in one efficient slice. Another tried to retreat, sabatoned feet scraping the rough floor as he turned. I drove him into a barrier of jagged umbra erupting from the tunnel wall.

The shouting started.

Fear had finally pushed the mages to act. The first drew on his magic to slice me with blades of air. Fire flared in the hands of the second, who’d been far too interested in Luna’s bloodline. In the total darkness, every man still standing flinched toward the flame, faces searching for me in its eerie light. Behind them, Thibault backed toward the tunnel mouth, putting his men between himself and me.

Coward.

I lifted my hand.

Conjurations snapped, binding wrists, pinning arms, sealing mouths. They flung all three mages back against the unyielding stone hard enough to crack bone, holding them there without mercy.

The fire-evoker tried to release his concentrated power. Flame surged toward me, but a wall of night rose to meet it, folding over the fire and snuffing it out. Only smoke and the sounds of him uselessly struggling against his restraints remained.

Less than a heartbeat later, the air-mage struck with a telekinetically strengthened blade of wind. The steel of my breastplate groaned at the impact. My feet slid backward. But the bond surged ahead of me, power snapping into place like a reflex. My connection to Lunette strengthened my pushback, driving him into the wall until all the breath left his body in a sudden, final exhalation. His pulse stopped beneath my conjuration a moment later.

Yet I cared with the level of contempt a wolf has for the lamb as he rips out its throat. The mage’s death was irrelevant. I only cared that Thibault saw the suffering he’d wrought.

The shadows tightened around the bound mages, forcing their slack-jawed attention onto the troop. They needed to see what their greed had caused. Their eyes moved over the bodies now scattered across the floor, over the men they’d ordered to take her away from me.

More and more shadows poured out of me. My magic pressed into the stone, into the air, into the men themselves until the space felt claimed, saturated with Nocthel protective fury. A low rumble filled the tunnel as my magic pressed against its walls, writhing and roiling with seething rage.

The air thickened with the iron tang of blood and smoke. The tremor became a low, rolling force that traveled up through my body and outward again as Death followed my will’s lead through the darkness.

The remaining soldiers tried to regroup, but I was growing impatient. A spear punched through one man’s spine as he turned. Another tried to run. A filament slipped through his visor and ended him where he stood.

I stepped past the bodies without slowing, leaving the mages bound, and moved toward her with the certainty that nothing left in this tunnel would be allowed to stand between us.

This was what I’d been born to do.

The evoker managed to tear a hand free for the briefest instant. Lightning cracked toward my back. The scent of ozone bit sharply against the stagnant smell of death.

What should’ve been a smooth wall emerged as jagged obsidian—shaped influenced by my near-insanity. It surged upward between us, intercepting the strike and shattering it into fragments of blinding light. The impact echoed through the confined space as dust rained down from above.

End him, the power urged.

This time I gave in.

And then there was only Thibault. For now.

One moment I was considering my infiltration into the room above, the next my guiding moonlight flickered out, plunging me into a type of darkness so complete I understood why the loss of a mate was fatal. The sensation was so violent it felt as though my heart had been physically torn from my chest.

I reached for her, but nothing answered. A terrifying silence filled the space where her soul connected to mine.

For one staggered second, I forgot how to breathe without her. My pulse became a war drum in my ears. The deliberate coldness I’d clung to with both hands to put down every man in that tunnel fell away beneath a terror more devastating than the battle.