She met his gaze steadily.
“Someone you never allowed me to be,” she said. “And someone who doesn’t need your approval anymore.”
He stared at her as though the world had tilted under his feet.
Kyrax turned slightly toward her, his voice no longer a threat but a quiet invitation.
Go. Take what you wish. I will watch him.
She nodded once.
Her father said her name again—pleading this time—but she didn’t answer.
She walked past him, past the memories, past the weight of all the years he’d shaped and suffocated.
Kyrax stayed where he stood, a dark, menacing sentinel, ensuring Richard Halden did not move a fraction.
Morgan stepped into her old room, a museum of a life she no longer recognized.
And for the first time since leaving Earth, she felt absolutely certain:
She was not coming back to this version of herself, this old life.
CHAPTER 34
The journey back to Vyranth felt different this time.
The first time she’d stepped onto a Vykan ship, she’d been terrified—disoriented, clinging to the last frayed threads of a life that felt stolen out from under her. Now she sat in the same curved seat, the hum of the engines thrumming through her bones like a remembered heartbeat, Kyrax’s presence a steady warmth beside her.
Her small bundle of Earth belongings rested at her feet.
That was all she’d taken.
A photograph of her mother and siblings when they’d still pretended to be a family.
A well-worn paperback she used to reread during sleepless nights.
A tiny box of seashells she’d collected as a child on a rare, quiet trip to Half Moon Bay.
Her favorite sweater, absurdly soft and a little stretched at the cuffs.
A sketchbook filled with unfinished drawings she wasn’t sure she would ever complete.
Kyrax had told her she could take anything—anything on Earth or in the span of stars he ruled over—and she had simply shrugged.
“This is enough,” she said when he gently lifted her bundle to inspect it.
He had stared at her long enough that she sensed his surprise through the bond.
Material things had never mattered to her. She’d only kept the pieces of her life that had made her feel human, grounded, something more than a pawn in her father’s dynasty.
Everything else could stay behind.
The descent through the upper mist of Vyranth was almost beautiful. The swirling grey parted around their ship like smoke sliding over ancient stone. Below, she caught the glint of the Void Bastion’s dark metal towers rising out of the mountainside like jagged, watchful sentinels.
Home.
The word formed in her chest before she could stop it.
