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“You twist the precedent,” the Entity snarled.

“I defined the terms,” I forced out, spitting blood onto the cracked boards. “You just assumed you could steal the rest.”

A monstrous screech shook the foundation. The amphitheater began to tear itself apart, support beams snapping like dry twigs while stone blocks plummeted from the vaulted ceiling.

“Then what did you offer?” the creature demanded, its form rippling violently.

“Witness,” I gasped, keeping my blurring eyes locked onto Evangeline’s black irises. “I offered to be the final witness. The one who looks at what you built and refuses to look away.”

“You cannot destroy me. I am eternal.”

“You aren’t eternal,” I whispered through the blood filling my mouth. “You’re just an appetite with a lease. And I am the one meal you cannot digest.”

The Entity surged forward in a final, desperate frenzy, driving its full mass into my body. The impact shattered my ribs. My spine arched backward under the sheer physical violence of the invasion, blood soaking through the remnants of my torn white dress and pooling across the floorboards.

Malachi was screaming my name, throwing himself against the invisible barrier, his hands bloody from the stone, but his voice sounded distant, submerged beneath a rising tide of static.

“You will yield,” the voice roared inside my skull. “You will break. You will become mine.”

“No,” I breathed. “I won’t.”

Instead of fighting the invasion, I opened every door inside myself.

I stopped resisting the cold. I stopped bracing against the pain. I let the Entity pour its entire century of accumulated hunger into my chest, opening myself like a vault to every scrap of voyeurism, cruelty, and false ownership it had hoarded since 1898.

As the torrent rushed in, the nature of the power shifted.

Because I wasn’t submitting as property. I was observing as a witness.

I saw the raw architecture of the parasite: born from Evangeline Vale’s desire to control her father’s cruelty, fattened on the passive cowardice of spectators who paid to watch suffering and walked away clean, and sustained by the coerced silence of men who believed their guilt made them monsters.

It was not a god. It was a parasitic loop of stolen confessions and forged contracts.

“You have no claim,” I whispered into the dark.

The Entity shrieked—a sound of sheer, unadulterated terror as its own weight turned inward.

Then, the dais exploded. Sconces shattered into iron shrapnel, and the wall of black flame collapsed into grey ash. Evangeline’s preserved body dissolved into dust, its century-old anchor finally disintegrating as the stolen power consumed its source.

Across from me, the bindings holding the chair snapped.

Dahlia fell forward onto her hands and knees, gasping for air as the pink conduit light vanished from her scars. When she lifted her head, her eyes were no longer black or hollow.

They were warm, human brown.

“Zinnia?” she choked out.

I tried to answer, tried to tell her to run, but the rupture’s physical toll took its price. My connection to my limbs severed. The floor tilted, and I felt the fragile thread tethering my consciousness snap under the weight of the collapsing foundation.

The last sound I heard through the falling stone was Malachi’s voice, shattered and frantic, echoing across the ruins.

“Zinnia, please . . . Don’t leave me, please⁠—”

Then the dark closed over my head, and everything went silent.

Chapter 17

Malachi