But I wasn’t here to lose.
I was here to settle a fifty-year-old grudge.
Every blow was fueled by my time spent in this hellhole, every cruelty, every humiliation I’d endured, but even more, by every second Emberline had suffered at his hands.
I drove the Overseer back, one step after another, to the platform’s edge.
Not until his back hit the railing, not until I sent his weapon flying, did the arrogant bastard realize… he had nowhere else to go.
He scanned the chaos behind me, strewn with the bodies of his dead guards. There was no one coming to save him, and I was the judgment he would face before he crossed the veil to whatever waited on the other side.
“This must be a surprise,” I mused. “I’ll bet you never thought this place would collapse around you. That you would die in the sand, like one of your prisoners.”
“You think this is over. You think you’ve won, but you’re only stepping from one prison into another,” he sneered. “Even if you kill me,nothingwill save you.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I snorted, assuming he was talking aboutthe demon the witch had put inside me, but then his baleful glare drifted past me…
To Emberline.
“Nor will this victory save her. You are all as doomed as any of these pathetic creatures.”
“Better than being eaten by worms, which is where you’re going, soon enough,” I countered.
“Better to be eaten by worms than live as I have for all these centuries.” The Overseer stared up at me, and the look on his face made me pause. That wasn’t fear, it wasn’t even hate…that was relief.
“Go ahead then, end my misery. When I see you in the Underworld, I’ll buy you a fucking drink as a thank you.”
I leaned down and wrapped my hand around his throat.
“If I could, I’d peel you apart one layer at a time and make you suffer. But I don’t have the fucking time.”
“Makemesuffer?” He laughed. “You don’t know what suffering is.” He pointed to the brand on his cheek. “Recognize this? It’s the mark of a thrall. And soon enough, you’ll have one, too. He’s going to turn all of you into his slaves, a Dynasty of thralls, and there is nothing you can do to stop him.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hissed, the axe gripped in one hand, every instinct urging me to be done with this and cut off these lies… exceptthey didn’t feel like lies.
I glanced at Nico and Gabriel, on the other side of the Pit, scuffling with the final group of guards. I could wait. Call them over…Nico was a Truthteller.
He’d know if the Overseer was lying, but—I ground my teeth together—we didn’t have time.
“Be glad it’s been fifty years since you’ve bled into the Basin. Your woman won’t be so lucky. And as for you, execution would have been a kindness.” He laughed,blood frothing at his lips. “This way, at least I’ll die knowing you’ll suffer for the rest of …”
“Shut your mouth,” I roared, bringing down the axe. “I am done listening to your poisonous lies.”
The blade cleaved through flesh and arteries and bone in one pass, not stopping until the edge was buried in the wooden edge of the platform.
The Overseer’s head landed face up in the sand ten feet away, mouth open, as if still halfway through whatever bullshit he’d been spewing, and I was glad I’d cut him off. I didn’t realize I was on my knees until a small hand curled around my shoulder, screams filtering past the roaring in my ears as another explosion detonated outside.
“We have got to go,” Emberline crouched down to stare into my eyes. “We have to go now, Dante. You have toget up.”
The entire compound shuddered, like the earth itself had split open. The dome above us finally cracked, coming down, not in pieces, but in a roaring avalanche.
Emberline grabbed my arm as sunlight vanished behind a wall of dust, the air thick enough to chew. My lungs burned. Tears streamed from my grit-filled eyes.
Then Nico was there, Gabriel, too, and we plunged into the surge of desperate prisoners scrambling toward the gap torn open in the outer wall where daylight poured in like a promise.
Freedom smelled like explosives and blood, and I’d never wanted it more.
We stumbledout of the Fossa together—four survivors of a nightmare—into a skeletal landscape still rocked by the aftershock of explosions, covered by rolling black smoke driven by high winds. Behind us, the prison roared one final time as the dome collapsed completely.
