Let me out.
“No,” I gasp, gripping the bedpost as the floor heaves. “Not yet.”
Below, Lucien fights the light itself. It slams him to his knees, blistering his skin.
The witches chant louder and the circle tightens.
And then I see something I’ve never seen before.
Lucien looks up at me and when lightning flashes once more I see a monster, not enraged butafraid.
“Elara!” His voice is ragged. “Run!”
But I can’t. I failed him once. I will not fail him again.
I stumble back to the balcony, blood dripping from my slashed palms where the sigil has burst open.
The magic inside me howls, clawing upward, desperate to protect him, to destroy everything in its path.
And then the world fractures.
A pulse erupts from my chest, a heartbeat made of thunder slamming through the air.
The red light around Lucien shatters and every candle in thepalazzoexplodes.
The witches’ screams rip through the storm.
The creature inside me laughs. Lucien rises from the rubble, eyes burning gold-white, his voice no longer human. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
When he moves again, it isn’t fury, it’s annihilation.
The witches collapse under his onslaught. Stone cracks and blood steams in the rain.
And when the courtyard stills, he stands amid ruin, naked, bleeding, steaming in the cold. He looks up at me and for a heartbeat, the terror returns.
Because he felt what I unleashed.
And he knows the Shackle-Soul is no longer content to bide its time.
13
THE AFTERMATH
LUCIEN
The rain still falls when the last witch dies.
It runs down my chest in crimson rivulets, dilutes the blood on my hands, cools the furnace roaring beneath my skin, but it does nothing—nothing—to quiet the echo still ringing through me, the psychic scream that wasn’t hers but felt like it, that pulled me back from the carnage with my heart in my throat.
“Elara.”
I am moving before the body at my feet hits the stones, sprinting through ruin and smoke, through shattered marble and sigils burned black by my rage. The courtyard dissolves behind me; the corridors warp into streaks of shadow and gold. Her scent of lilies crushed under rain, iron blooming from a wound, the faint electric crackle of magic pulls me upward like a hook barbed straight through my sternum.
When I reach the upper hall, the walls themselves pulse with light, old runes awakening like an ancient beast roused from slumber, veins of crimson magic crawling hungrily toward her chamber as if drawn by the same panic that tears through me.
The door isdestroyedbeneath my rage.
The explosion of wood reveals her on the floor, clutching the carved bedpost with white knuckles, her entire body bowed under the invisible weight trying to tear its way out of her.
