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“I hear.”
“Good. Then hear this too: you will never earn another’s heart. You are beyond that. But the choice is yours nonetheless. You had an opportunity for salvation, but I believe it already squandered.” He turned back to Juliana. “Anything to add, my dear?”
Juliana came forward, blade extended. “His name was Dillon Woodfern,” she told him.
“What?”
“There will come a time when you regret what you have done, if only because you will wish we’d killed you now. When you wish for death, remember him. The man you killed. The reason you live. I want you to remember his name.”
Ladrien said nothing.
Juliana pressed the blade deeper. “Swear it,” she hissed.
Ladrien’s throat bobbed, blood bubbling at the tip of Juliana’s sword. “I will remember his name.”
“Say it.”
“Dillon,” he whispered. “His name was Dillon Woodfern.”
Hawthorn’s eyes caught Juliana’s, and he nodded in approval, before turning back to Ladrien. He extended his long, elegant fingers, holding them over his chest.
Juliana did not look away when the light began to tug out of Ladrien and into Hawthorn’s fingertips, even when it brightened and boiled to the point of pure, harsh white, even when Ladrien began to twitch, when his broken wing twisted, when his entire body bent backwards, magic being ripped from every pore.
Even when he started to scream.
She wanted it to hurt, although she found no joy in the pain, no joy in watching him cower. She felt nothing except for a mild, dizzying kind of relief. He deserved this. This was better than death, even if a part of her blade still itched for his blood.
She suspected it always would.
Finally, it was over. Hawthorn’s skin hummed with a golden glow, radiating with power. He clicked his fingers, and a shimmering portal opened in his room, displaying the snowy mountains and the rocky ruins of the old Winter Court.
Bare, barren and empty. Ladrien’s home for the next a hundred years.
The former king stared at it. For all he had said the time meant nothing to him, he did not seem willing to go.
Hawthorn swished his hands, like a wave of indifference, and the portal swept forward and swallowed Ladrien whole. He let out a scream, but it cut short when the portal vanished.
The last Juliana saw of Ladrien, he was standing in the frigid cold, bruised and bleeding.
And utterly alone.
Hawthorn slumped the second the portal disappeared. For all the magic he’d just absorbed, portal-making was no easy feat, and he had just nearly died.
He’d nearly died. She’d nearly lost him.
“Careful,” Juliana warned, arms around him.
Hawthorn grinned, his smile very close to her. “Worried, my dear Jules?”
“A bit,” she admitted, still feeling slightly dizzy herself, like she expected the world to be ripped away from her again. Like she expectedhimto be ripped away. “You probably shouldn’t use any more magic for a while.”
“But I look so dashing when I do it…” He stepped away from her, swirling his fingers. Through the open door, Juliana spied the damage to the castle being knitted back together, stone snapping back into place, torn tapestries mending, vines curling along the walls.
Hawthorn sighed, the power stuttering through him. Sounds turned around them, shouts and cries, tentative cheers.
“We… should probably go downstairs,” she said. “We have some explaining to do.”
“That we certainly do,” he said, still grinning irrepressibly. “I don’t have to marry Serena.”
