“No!” Kai shouts.
On instinct the curse rips free, a beast unleashed that wraps Mal in pink light. It hits her, stopping her in place, but I realize my mistake too late.
“Aura, no!” Talon yells.
My power ricochets off her, slamming her back a step but slamming into me twice as hard. The curse turns on me with the full brunt of a deadly beast. The cavernous emptiness inside me tears wider, edges burning and infected, a wound that eats deeper with every breath.
It’s like at Poison Apple all over again, except worse. I’ve grown stronger, and my power strikes deeper.
My muscles lock, clench, tremble. My hunger gnashes at my insides. I…need. I need so bad.
“You think to hurt me?” Mal says with affronted disbelief. “Why, you little slut, you are too hungry to do anything else butfeed.” The word is sonorous, loaded with magic as she pointedly looks between me and Talon.Then she laughs, a horrible sound that cements the pain and emptiness writhing inside me.
Her eyes glow red with malice and magic. Energy crackles around her, building fast, savage. She’s working up toward something catastrophic.
Talon’s hand flashes to Snow’s belt, pulling free one of her daggers with a practiced twist. In the same breath, the blade drives clean and hard through Mal’s chest.
Her laugh dies in a ragged choke.
Shock slams into me. It happened so fast. Too fast. My brain can’t catch up to what it means, but my knees buckle until I stagger.
My hope shrivels into a tiny black ball that decays as quickly as Mal’s life.
Blood bubbles from her lips as she looks down at the dagger buried in her heart before turning to Kai. “Little…brother…”
Kai doesn’t flinch, though his face crumples with anguish. “This has to end, Mal.” His voice breaks. “It ends with us.”
Cinder seizes his arm, anchoring him as his whole body trembles beneath her grip.
Mal’s hand spasms, clawing weakly at the air. Her gaze snags on me with all the hate and blame I’ve embodied for her since I was a baby.
Her body gives out, folding in on itself, hitting the earth with a dull, final thud. Her body crumpled like a goddamn afterthought. The grass around her drinks up her blood.
I stare.
My heart slams against my chest, but I can’t tell if it’s grief or fury or fear.
“Aura, I had to,” Talon says from somewhere far away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The words don’t land. They drift around me, muffled, as if the air itself has swallowed them up. My fingers are numb, my legs heavy, and yet my heart hammers so hard it makes my vision pulse white at the edges. I can’t move. Can’t breathe.
That was it. That was my chance. My tiny, shimmering thread of hope.
She said she could undo it.
Shewas going to. If she lived, she would have been imprisoned, and I would have found a way to bring her around. Even if it took years, there was a chance. A chance I’d be free. Talon and I could at least be together by choice, not because of this fucked up arrangement that forces me to be with everyone except him.
But now she’s dead.
The curse—the one she draped over my crib like a noose—is carved into my bones forever.
I’m never going to touch him without consequence. I’m never going to stop feeding. I’ll always have to fuck to survive. Always have to tiptoe the edge of murder just to stay sane.
Nothing’s changed.
My throat tightens, glass lodged there, cutting deeper with every breath. My hands curl into fists, nails biting crescent moons into my palms, trying to hold myself together with sheer force of will.
The ache in my chest spreads outward, crawling in sharp fractures through my ribs, my spine, down into my stomach where it twists into a knife’s edge. Everything inside me pulls tight, raw, frayed. I’m so tired. I’ve fought so hard to be someone new. To be who I want to be, only to come home exactly as I left.
