Kael crouches beside the guard, and whispers low and unhinged, “And beg for your fucking life.”
He does.
The guard drags himself forward on hands and knees, pained groans and rasping breaths wheezing in and out of him.
But Elyssara can’t bring herself to care.
She’s so fucking tired of men feeling entitled to her—her power, her body, her mercy.
“I can’t hear an apology,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” the man begs, desperately trying to reach for her. “Please.”
Kael looks at her then, with eyes of endless dark, and she realizes she’s made a grave error: she has encouraged the Decay. Validated. Approved of it. Welcomed it.
And worse—he felt it. Through the tether. Her approval landing like permission.
Elyssara knows something in that moment—Kael is not in control.
This is the Decay.
Fuck.
The man tries to speak again, tries to bargain, to beg, but the words never make it past his teeth.
Shadow surges down the guard’s arms, veins blackening in an instant as his breath seizes, his body folding inward with a sound like cloth tearing. He collapses to the stone, eyes wide, mouth frozen around a scream that never lands.
Kael does not look away from Elyssara.
But his words whisper into the ear of the dying man he never intended to spare. “I said: don’t touch her.” His words are soft, but they land like a verdict.
For a single, suspended heartbeat, everything stills.
Laryn swears viciously. “Move!”
And chaos detonates.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The loyal often pay the most
Ask any grave. Ask any ghost.
The ocean announcesitself with violence.
Wind slams into Seren’s body hard enough to steal her breath, salt burning her lips, black spray needling exposed skin like a thousand small knives. The spray spreads across her skin like ink staining parchment, and it seeps into every crack and crevice of the rocks. The sky churns above her—steel-gray and restless—while the sea below surges and fractures, wave upon wave breaking against the jagged stone like a warning delivered over and over again.
Do not come closer.
The message is unmistakable.
The water does not want her here.
For a single breath, the sea stills.
Not calm.
Not quiet.
