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For a moment, he seems almost unsure what to do. But eventually, he places his hand over hers. “Thank your brother,” he says quietly.

CHAPTER 69

• Alessia •

Three Months Later

THE FIRST THING I notice when we return to Purgatory is that Zander’s banners are gone.

For a long moment, I stand at the rail of the ship and stare at the empty posts rising along the pier. Now, where the Lycan King’s colors once snapped in the wind above the dockworkers and guards, there is nothing, and it’s strange to see them stripped bare, like it is the end of a war I forgot I was living in.

In the past, the days between the handover were like breathing for the first time, taking in a long breath only to hold it again when the next king was introduced. I imagine that is what everyone is doing right now, sucking in that last breath of freedom while wondering what the next two years of horrors will bring.

Men move along the docks with a dark Sangremere cloth folded over their arms, waiting for the order to raise it, and even before the first banner unfurls, the island feels as though it knows one king has loosened his grip only so another can close his own.

Kylian stands beside me, silent as the ship is tied off, one hand resting lightly at my back while his gaze moves over the pier, the guards, the sea wall, and the thin line of people waiting farther up the road.

No one cheers. No one rushes forward. Purgatory has never been a place that welcomes kings with love. It survives them.

When we step onto the dock, the air tastes of salt, wet ash, and soil that has been turned over too many times without ever healing. The cold wind presses through my coat, either in welcome or in warning, but I’m not sure which.

As we pass through the flesh markets, tired faces peer back at us. Desperation and hopelessness as evident as the filth on their clothes. Eagan opens the carriage door, and Kylian helps me in before climbing in beside me. Once the door shuts and the horses pull us from the docks, I turn toward the window.

The road to the castle is worse than I remember. Storms have beaten the island raw. Trees bend at strange angles along the roadside, their branches twisted and stripped bare, roots exposed where the soil has been ripped away by water and wind.

The fences that once divided fields from the road have fallen in places, dragged down by mud, neglect, or the weight of weather that refused to stop coming. The fields are dull and flattened. Some are flooded. Others lie cracked beneath a thin crust of salt, and the few crops still standing lean solemnly in the wind, as if they are only waiting to die.

The cottages near the lower road show the same ruin, with roofs patched in old sailcloth, windows boarded, doors hanging crooked, and smoke rising from chimneys in thin, tired streams that disappear almost at once into the gray sky.

Kylian says nothing, but I feel him through the bond, the slow tightening of his concern each time my breath catches at another broken place, another sign of what Zander’s rule left behind.

“He stayed too long.”

Kylian’s gaze shifts to me.

“Zander?”

I nod, still staring out at the land. “Each king takes what he can before the next one comes, but he stayed long enough for the island to start showing it.”

Kylian’s jaw tightens. “Then it will be repaired.”

I want to believe him in the promise sitting behind it, but Purgatory is not a thing easily repaired, and some damage sinks too deep for new banners and better orders to fix.

The carriage climbs toward the castle road, where the trees grow thicker and the old paths disappear beneath grass, thorns, and fallen branches, and just as the road bends toward the black shape of the castle ahead, something catches in my chest.

“Stop,” I say.

Eagan looks at me at once.

Kylian’s hand moves toward mine. “Alessia?”

“Stop the carriage,” I repeat, and this time my voice is steadier.

Eagan gives the order without waiting for Kylian, and the carriage slows with a groan of wheels, stopping beside an overgrown path that breaks away from the main road and vanishes beneath a canopy of bent trees.

For a moment, no one moves. Then I open the door myself.

“Alessia,” Kylian says behind me, already climbing out after me.