“Then I’ll tear every last one of them to pieces. Just like I did to those gutter-born hags who dared put their hands on what’s mine last time.”
He crosses to the balcony doors and throws them open and I follow without hesitation, only half-realizing I’m naked, but the thought evaporates under the crushing certainty that something worse than exposure is coming for us.
Wind howls through the room as lightning scars the sky.
The courtyard heaves with movement, and it takes but a moment to see the hooded figures holding torches that burn despite the rain. Their chanting rises in waves, old Latin merging with something older still.
The air ripples.
The marble trembles.
“Lucien—no?—”
Too late.
He vaults over the railing, landing among them in a blur of black and gold and crimson.
The impact shakes the ground and for a heartbeat, even the rain suspends in the wake of his fury.
I rush to the balcony, fingers gripping iron and what I see turns my blood to ice.
He moves like a shadow unbound.
The first witch barely has time to scream before his claw tears through her chest, blood fanning across stone.
Another raises a ward sigil. Lucien’s power shatters it as if it’s smoke.
He’s beautiful the way natural disasters are—unstoppable, merciless, incandescent with wrath. But the number heaving around him. They’re too much.
“Lucien!” I scream. But he’s too far gone to hear.
He tears through a half dozen, but the witches regroup quickly, forming a circle, voices merging and building. The air thickens and the scent of iron floods my lungs.
I know this spell.
It’s not a death curse…it’s a binding.
They’re not trying to kill him. They’re trying to cage him again.
To finish what they began a quarter of a century ago; what they placed the Shackle-Soul inside me to complete.
“Lucien!” I shout. “Get out of the circle!”
He freezes mid-strike, head snapping up.
For an instant we lock eyes.
Realization flickers. But it’s too late.
The circle ignites and a column of red light spears upward, wrapping around him.
The force knocks me back from the balcony and pain explodes across my ribs as I hit marble. “No—no, no?—”
I drag myself up, reaching for the magic I swore never to touch again. My blood burns as the sigil along my spine writhes violently, no longer a parasite contained or weakened, but a creature awakening.
Behind me, the room shakes.
Lightning crawls across the ceiling as my power surges free. The bindings they carved into me centuries ago scream in protest—the remnants of the Shackle-Soul clawing for control.
