Page 208 of Blood Curse

Thin red paths burst into view around us.

They stretched from the metal in Bryony’s hair to every vampire under the covered walk. One ran through Elias’s chest. Another reached Mara where she held the gate. Dozens vanished into the house, fine as veins: the empty channels left by every order the Crown had given through Bryony.

The spring caught the nearest path and burned along it.

Elias staggered. His hand flew to his sternum, then dropped as the red line turned white and broke apart.

The same fire raced towards the court.

Mara’s path snapped. Then the next. Then all of them.

Vampires cried out across the covered walk as something foreign left their bodies. The sound held shock rather than pain. The last traces of the Crown’s commands lifted from their skin like sparks in rain.

Harrowmere lost its grip on the gate.

The iron slammed back against the wall. Mara caught it before it rebounded and waved two vampires clear of the broken roof. They moved because she asked, not because magic turned her words into chains.

The difference reached me like air after drowning.

The Crown felt it too.

Cold flooded from the band into Bryony’s body. Her knees folded. I took her weight against my chest without lifting her hand from the carving.

The movement drove the dagger deeper.

Pain tore across my ribs. My heart missed one beat, hit the next too hard and kept going.

Elias was in the water before the splash settled.

“Stellan.” His attention fixed on the blade. “Your legs?”

“Still mine.”

“Keep them that way.”

He put himself within reach but didn’t touch the dagger. The choice remained in my hand.

The spring pulled again.

Strength drained from my shoulders. The edges of the garden sharpened, then blurred. Bryony felt the change in me. Her free hand closed over my wrist where I gripped the hilt.

“Enough,” she said.

The spring was still drawing blood. The Crown was still fixed to her scalp. Every instinct I had told me to give more until the metal was gone, even if nothing was left of me when it left.

Her fingers tightened.

“You don’t get to make dying the price of loving me.”

The words landed harder than the blade.

For a hundred and twelve years, I had treated endurance as proof of devotion. Hold the throne. Hold the court. Hold every wound until someone else could walk away from it. I knew how to turn love into another duty and call the damage honour.

Bryony had never wanted that bargain.

She wanted the man who argued over a kitchen drawer and stood in her doorway trying not to stare at her bare legs. The man who could be infuriating, hungry and alive tomorrow. She had offered me a life, not a prettier death.

I wanted it with an ache sharper than the blade: her key beside mine, her books invading every room, her temper meeting mine without a throne between us. Wanting to survive was not a failure of courage. It was the promise I was making her now.