Page 233 of The Dark Lord’s Guide to Honeymooning (and Other Acts of Tyranny)

I felt myself changing. Not physically—not yet—but metaphysically. The Heirloom wasn’t just channeling the Shadow King’s power into me. It was transforming me into something new. An anchor point, like the Golden Roses had been, but mobile. Alive.

A doorway that walked and breathed and could act in the physical world while remaining connected to the ley lines.

The failing anchors beneath the blackened Golden Rose Fields shuddered as the magical balance shifted. I could sense them through the web—seven ancient points of power, weakened by centuries of misuse. They’d been designed to hold the Shadow King’s prison stable, to keep the cocoon of ley lines tight around his essence.

But I was something different. Something he’d never had before.

A way to be in both places at once.

His consciousness settled into my body like a hand sliding into a glove. Not fighting my defenses but flowing through them, around them, becoming them. The Shadow King had been scattered for so long—main essence in the cocoon prison and then the ley lines, and what I saw as fragments lost across the centuries. Now he was consolidating, pulling himself together.

And I was the missing piece that made it all work.

My body stood without my permission. My hand released Kazimir’s head, letting it fall back to the blood-soaked ground. When I looked down at him, I knew my eyes were no longer my own.

“Hello again, old friend,” my voice said, though the words weren’t mine. “Did you miss me?”

I tried to fight, to push back against the consciousness drowning mine, but the Shadow King had been planning this, watching me for weeks through the ley lines. He’d been waiting for his opportunity. Auremar’s death had given it to him.

And then when the opening came, the Shadow King seized it.

My will shattered against his. Every mental barrier I threw up crumbled to dust.

Don’t fight, he whispered inside my skull. You’re not being destroyed, little hero. You’re being elevated. Together, we’ll reshape this world into something glorious.

The last thing I saw before the Shadow King’s will enveloped mine was Kazimir’s face—the moment of recognition, of horror, of understanding that in trying to save him, I’d doomed myself.

Then the ancient consciousness wrapped around mine like chains, and the woman called Arabella Blackrose drowned in shadow.

68 Win the Battle, Lose Your Wife

(Classic Villain Move)

Kazimir

Hello again, old friend. Did you miss me?”

The words came from Arabella’s mouth, but they weren’t hers. The inflection was wrong, the cadence ancient, and her eyes—fuck, her eyes were pools of living darkness that reflected nothing.

Nyx landed hard beside us, her wings spread wide and trembling. The dragon’s liquid silver eyes were wild with distress, and she let out a keening wail that made my bones ache. She stretched toward Arabella, then recoiled.

Arabella’s head jerked to the side in an unnatural angle, then snapped back, her limbs moving in stuttering, puppetlike motions as if invisible strings controlled her body and she was fighting against them.

I tried to push myself up, but my body betrayed me. Every muscle screamed from the internal battle I’d just fought. The runes throbbed with a dull, persistent ache that made thinking difficult.

Our bond was silent. No warmth from the Heirloom’s power, no electric current of connection between us—just a hollow void inside my chest where Arabella’s presence should have been.

Nyx circled us in agitation, her claws scoring deep grooves in the earth. Every few seconds she’d dart forward, trying to reach Arabella, only to pull back with a distressed rumble.

“What’s wrong?” Arabella’s voice continued, though it was the Shadow King speaking. Her arm twitched before extending toward me in a grotesque parody of concern. “No witty retort? No villainous monologue? You’ve changed, Kazimir. Or should I say that you’ve forgotten who you really are.”

My gaze flicked to Auremar’s corpse. The golden king lay in a spreading pool of blood, Arabella’s throwing knives still protruding from his eye and throat. Part of me—a dark, vicious part—wanted to crawl over there and mutilate the body. To tear it apart with my bare hands for what his death had caused.

But that impulse passed as quickly as it had come. Revenge on a corpse wouldn’t save Arabella.

“Get out of her,” I growled, finally managing to sit up properly. The battlefield spun around me, but I forced myself to focus.

The Shadow King laughed with Arabella’s voice, and it was wrong, so fucking wrong. Her body convulsed with the laughter, shoulders jerking backward before her spine arched at an impossible angle. And I guessed that the Shadow King was purposefully allowing the strange movements to torture me. “But she basically invited me in when she killed that pathetic excuse for a king. All that power, all that hybrid magic singing through her veins. She’s a much better vessel than you ever were.”