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“We don’t know that! I could have taken it, I could have absorbed the phoenixes…”
Darius grabs my face in his hands. “Look up, Aleera, there aren’t enough of them. You think you can, but you can’t. That stone was a power absorber. The moment you touched it, you activated it. It wouldn’t stop absorbing you or your birds until it contained everything you had left. Then what? You were giving the power hunters the ultimate weapon, the ultimate power.” I shake my head, tears streaming down my face at my stupidity. I was angry at him but mostly angry at myself, knowing this was my fault, I should have killed her when I saw her, I should have told them.
“We don’t know that,” I croak.
“I do! Because the magic that was used to create that stone. Is mine. For years I was their weapon,” Darius says, letting me go, and I stagger back and look at him.
“What?”
“As soon as I saw that stone in your hand and the rune on it, I knew it was mine.”
I shake my head. He was wrong. It was my mother’s magic. I felt it inside that stone.
“No, it was my mother’s power. I could feel it.”
Darius clutches his hair and screams in frustration. The torment coming through the bond causes him physical pain, and my chest feels restricted. I can hardly breathe.
“I couldn’t save them, you, I can save,” Darius yells at me.
“What are you talking about? It was my mother's magic!” I scream at him.
“It was mine, think, Aleera. Think about it, think about everything I have told you, what you have seen! What you know!”
I shake my head when he grasps my face in his hands.
“Think, Aleera, the second plague. How did your mother survive it?” Darius asks me.
“My father, he did something to her.”
Darius nods before he whispers, “He fed her my blood.”
“But that makes no sense,” I tell him, gripping his shirt and pushing back against him as the shred coursed through me. I sense his magic and try to ignore it. I instead focus on my anger rather than the burning lust coursing through me. My bond knows he’s the last one. With him, I would awaken my full potential. My body knows this with every fiber in my being. I want him, I want his power.
“It does if I am the plague. I created it; I unleashed it. You want to know how I can sacrifice an entire city for you? Because I already sacrificed the entire world thinking I was saving you all. I told you I have blood on my hands, and I told you that you didn’t want to know the sort of monster you lay beside at night. I am the plague Aleera, the reason it exists, the reason it got out, and the only cure, or I was before…” he stares up at the sky, at my phoenixes. “Before I destroyed that too.”
“You were just a boy. You have this stupid idea in your head that you did this, but you didn’t!”
Darius laughs. “Didn’t I? My father wanted to destroy it, told me to destroy it when we learned what it was capable of–” he pauses and shakes his head and clenches his teeth.
“You think you know, but you don’t,” Darius tells me, and I reach for him, but he pulls away, placing his hands in the air, not wanting my touch. It stings, but I refuse to let him escape it this time.
“Then tell me?” I growl at him, recharging off slivers of power off my phoenixes to hold him here, but he breaks it easily, feeding off my energy.
“It all leads back to me, all of you, Kalen, Lycus.” Darius looks over his shoulder at Tobias. “Thomas, it’s all my fault,” he tells me, looking back at me. “You can hate me all you want, but I stand by what I did, their lives or yours?” he says, pointing to our mates. "Their lives!"
“I’ll choose you all every damn time. No matter the sacrifice, I did not kill the world to lose what’s left of mine. You are mine. Every single one of you, mine, my life. I won’t lose you again. I just got you back,” he growls at me, with a sheen of madness in his eyes.
“You are making no sense, you—”
“It doesn’t have to make sense, Aleera! I did this. Not you, so what I did doesn‘t taint you. It's all my fault,” he tells me, and I shake my head while he growls, turning on his heel.
“Show me!” I plead with him.
Darius opens up a portal.
“Darius?” Tobias asks, and Darius stops looking at him. “What have you done?” Darius looks back at me.
“I chose her."
