Page 55 of The Reckoning of Starlight

The guard stood where Jassyn had left him, glassy-eyed and breathing, waiting for the next order.

The thought rose before conscience could catch it, logic already justifying the horror.

Blossom would need her strength if they were to escape.

Still, Jassyn swallowed, his throat gone to dust. “What if they offer themselves?”

Blossom’s nostrils flared with a low chuff, vines thickening between her claws.

Willing prey had never been forbidden.

Jassyn turned to face the guard. The male stared blankly ahead, lips parted, sweat clinging to his brow. Blood crusted under his nose and tracked in thin crimson trails from the corners of his eyes.

Jassyn reached into what remained of the male’s mind and speared compulsion through the wreckage, filling the ravaged places with purpose.

His voice found a ruthless stillness he’d only ever heard from Lykor.

“Remove your weapons,” he ordered. “Your armor. Kneel before her.”

The guard’s hands moved without resistance, loosening buckles, sliding straps free. Metal struck earth piece by piece—gauntlets, dagger, sword, the slow disarming of a male who no longer had a choice.

Blossom wrapped her tail tight around herself, the spikes along her jaw flattening. She didn’t move, but her ribcage expanded in slow, weighted shudders, each exhale stirring Jassyn’s curls.

The discarded armor and blades lay by Jassyn’s feet. His pulse ticked faster. He didn’t know how to shape Blossom’s gift, not truly, but the garden was already waiting.

He reached for the bloom in his chest and power rushed through him. The ground shifted under the metal as he willed it, swallowing each piece into the loam as though the estate had decided to hide the evidence.

No trace. No trail.

The guard took a step forward.

Then another.

Blossom’s lips peeled back from her fangs. Barbed tendrils lashed from her maw, puncturing the guard’s chest in a single strike.

His body jerked once.

Then split.

The vines wrenched him free of the ground, hauling what remained toward her jaws.

Revulsion should’ve found Jassyn.

Nothing came.

He didn’t flinch when bones cracked like timber, when tendons snapped with a wet grind. And when it ended—when the guard vanished down Blossom’s throat, when the vines withdrew and only blood remained, dripping from her fangs—Jassyn didn’t look away.

He listened to the silence that followed.

Blossom stretched before him, talons flexing into the churned soil, dirt shedding from her plated hide as she shook her scales. Flowers unfurled in a riotous bloom, color spilling in every direction. A pulse of her satisfaction pressed into Jassyn’s chest, too rough and wild to be gratitude.

Jassyn turned toward the estate.

Behind him, Blossom followed, each footfall shaking the earth.

Another surge of her awareness split open behind his eyes, fierce and bolstering.

The taste of honey. The sting of venom. Beehives swollen in summer heat, every worker humming with blind devotion. Blossom’s meaning sharpened.