I shove my palms against the stone, every muscle in my body screaming as I fight to rise, my stomach lurching with the effort, but I don’t stop. I can’t. Because then, then I hear it. The screeching drag of a blade against stone. That high-pitched shriek that sets my teeth on edge, makes my entire body recoil in instinctive horror. I turn and see him.
Daed.
He walks with slow, striding steps, stalking toward Modok, his hand wrapped around Death Singer, and though he is mine—my Daed, my husband, my mate—I can already feel the wrongness radiating from him. I see it in his eyes as they roll black. I feel it in the tether between us, stretched and fraying.
The rain carves rivers down his skin. The ink of his sigils, the ones that protect him, the ones that hide him from Gygarth, from the void itself, they begin to run. Thick, oily streaks of black bleeding from his body like tears.
He raises his sword, voice like smoke and thunder.
“Give me the child,” he demands. “Or give me your head.”
Modok’s arms tighten around our daughter, pressing her closer. “One move, Daedalus, and I will crush the life from her body. You know I will.”
But Daed doesn’t stop.
He keeps coming.
His steps slow, unrelenting, deadly. The last of his sigils melts away, pooling around his feet. They’re gone. All of them. The last protections he had, the only thing keeping him from being found. From being taken. From being consumed.
But Daed no longer looks like a male who cares about being found.
He walks like vengeance incarnate. Like a Fae who has surrendered everything that once tethered him to this world. He is what I was warned about. The cursed prince whose soul belonged not to me, not even to himself, but to the darkness that waits with outstretched hands and as the final drip of ink falls from his fingertip, splashing against the stone like a heartbeat, something stirs.
A speck of midnight and silver, flaring to life in the air before him. Small at first, a flicker, but it grows. Faster than I can breathe. A maw opens wide and infinite and full of screams, a gaping mouth of nothing.
The void.
He is here.
He has found us.
But it is not Gygarth who slithers through, descending on this world like a nightmare. No, it is the other. The one I glimpsed in the portal. The one who haunts the edge of dreams. A skeletal figure draped in black, flesh like dried leather stretched too thin over bones too long, claws that drag like blades through the air, and beneath his chin, a writhing beard of tentacles, slick and twitching and hungry.
Modok snarls, voice cracking with rage tainted with fear. “Save your pathetic Mordorin tricks! I will kill every fucking last one of…”
But he doesn’t finish. The creature lifts one hand in a slow, languid motion, so casual, so cruel, and the air itself answers. Smoke, black and thick like spilled ink, erupts from his fingertips, soaring across the courtyard in serpent coils. It wraps around Modok in an instant, twining around his limbs, tightening. I scream. Iscream, because I see her, my daughter, torn from his arms, flung skyward like a discarded doll.
The sound that rips from my chest is not human. It is pain and terror and fury forged into a single note that rends the very core of this world. Thunder silences. Lightning halts mid-strike. The world holds its breath as my daughter sails through the air, arms outstretched, her tiny mouth open in a cry I cannot hear over the roar of my heart.
The demon flicks its wrist.
Modok explodes.
His body tears apart in a vicious snap, limbs ripped in four directions, blood raining down in thick splatters. A scream shatters the air, not mine this time, but Nyraxes’, her brother’s blood hot on her skin. Her hands claw down her cheeks in horror, but I barely register her. I see only my daughter.
She’s still falling.
I lunge, scrambling to my feet, legs numb, arms desperately reaching, but I am too far. The space between us is a chasm. My hands stretch through it anyway, begging the Souls, the void, the creature who brought this nightmare,anyone, to let me be fast enough, strong enough.
But then a blur of movement surges past me. A body, reckless and sure, hurls itself against the wet stone.
Ronin.
He hits the ground hard, the slap of his body making me flinch, but he never looks away from her. He reaches, catches, curls his body around hers just before she hits the ground.
A sob tears from my throat. My knees threaten to buckle.
“Thank you,” I gasp, the words barely a breath. “Thank you, Ronin.”
