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Even in my terrified haze, I suddenly realized it stood to reason dragon shifters had alphas just like wolves did. For all I knew, they also had packs and fated mates. But that didn’t matter to me. I hadn’t seen the bright shine of red in her gaze like I’d seen in Fenris’s when he’d used his command. Zyanya simply spoke, and I’d been compelled to obey.
How did this happen?I hadn’t even known she existed before I’d transported myself to Egypt, and that couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes ago.
I have to figure out how to get out of here.Zyanya had proclaimed thatIwould be the one to kill Fenris, and there was no way on earth I’d stick around long enough for her to cast a spell or give me another alpha command.I just have to get my legs to move!
“Oh, dear, you are still trying, aren’t you?” Zyanya murmured, crouching down to grin right at me. “It isn’t going to work, I’m afraid. You’ll do as I ask, whether it be to kiss my boot or kill your precious Lunar Lord.”
I froze as if she’d slapped me. “I won’t,” I replied, working up my last ounce of courage as I stared her in the eyes. “I won’t kill him.” The very idea of harming my fated mate made my guts twist and my wolf writhe.
The woman in front of me laughed and shook her head as if I were a small child explaining something simple but misguided to her. Her laughter sounded almost mechanical.
“That’s not how this works,” she replied, righting herself. “Let me spell this out for you, child. The Lunar Lord and I have been playing this game for averylong time. So long, a mere mortal could simply not comprehend. A move of one piece could extend far past your meager lifetime.” Her grin sharpened, and I felt another chill run through me. “What you think on the matter is entirely inconsequential.”
I shivered despite myself. “You can’t make me,” I whispered, feeling more like a petulant child than a strong witch or an adult shifter.
Zyanya blinked, slow and lizard-like. “I seem to recall your mother saying the same thing to me,” she said after a pause that lasted too long. “Hmm, yes, that’s who it was. She was a bit harder to track than some of the other Handmaiden witches, but all she ended up doing was delaying the inevitable.” She clicked her tongue. “She thought she’d hide her child and preserve the Handmaiden line. We see how well that turned out for her, hmm?” Her yellow gaze slid back to me.
My throat thickened as I tried to swallow.Is that…my mother was killed by this…thismonster? And the others? They all met this fate? Why didn’t anyone help them? Why didn’t Fenris help them?
“What’s the point?” I finally managed, my voice raspy with fear. “You have me. What’s the point of killing them all off?”
Zyanya ran her tongue over her teeth, revealing a pair of wickedly pointed canines that I tried not to gape at. “I can’t risk those irritating witches crowning a new Lunar Lord right after I kill the old one, now can I?” She arched a brow. “They picked the first one so arbitrarily, after all. A complete overreach of their power. They couldn’t be trusted not to meddle, and if their precious little lord was taken away, I’m certain they would do the exact same thing all over again.” She hissed, an entirely serpentine sound, and bared her teeth in her first show of real emotion.
My fear almost made me gag. Even my wolf seemed to have curled up, taking up so little space in my mind, it was like she’d disappeared.
“No. I would not run the risk of the witches hiding a new lord from me,” she continued. “They couldn’t be allowed to live. Not one of them.” Her gaze moved back to me. “How lucky for me thatyou, of all people, were the last of them.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my skin crawling. I wanted to know, but also really didn’t want to know. I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “I hadn’t evenheardof you until a few weeks ago. Don’t pretend you’re some great, overarching influence.”
She laughed again, an awful, tinny sound. “Girl, do you think I would leave loose ends dangling?” she demanded, her golden eyes flashing dangerously. “Your mother was difficult to track, but I found her. Enora thought herself so secretive, but she wasn’t. Not compared to me.” She snorted. “I found a friend of hers. I thought he might lead me to her, but oh, even I couldn’t foresee the treasure he would offer me. He was an alpha of a small pack. A pathetic creature. I was going to torture him to find out where he was hiding Enora, but he would do anything to defend his pack from harm—and so he did. He pledged his loyalty, his pack’s loyalty, and all his future progeny to me.” Zyanya stopped talking, her smile curling up at the ends.
Future progeny…my father gave me away before I was born? To her?I felt like I might be sick, but being frozen in place, I couldn’t even retch.
“I let him be on his way after that,” Zyanya continued. “Why tire myself searching for this Handmaiden witch when this fool would bring me to her and give me any of her children? I couldn’t have planned it better. Sabine just gave him…a little nudge, and he became convinced they were fated mates. And here you are, just as loyal to me as he was.” She waved a hand at me, smiling at me like I was her favorite pet.
I bit my lip. “Why not just kill me alongside my mother?” I whispered. “That would be easier. No Handmaiden witches to make a Lunar Lord. None of this.”
She sneered. “You don’t get to question me,” she snarled, and her eyes looked molten for a moment. “I’ve waitedcenturiesfor this eclipse, and I won’t risk the Lunar Lord going into hiding to spare himself. Hewilldie, once and for all. And he won’t even fight it, not with his fated mate.” Zyanya bared her teeth. “Iwilltake my ancestors’ power back. The Handmaiden witches stole it from us, and nothing could be more just than the last Handmaiden handing it back. Your lifetime is but a blink, girl. Do not flatter yourself thinking I have spent time agonizing over each event. It’s simple—one must shape a tool for a job if they expect the job to be done well, and indeed, you are no more than that. A tool.Mytool.”
My cold fear finally gave way to a rage I hadn’t known myself capable of. This woman—thiscreature—she had doneeverything. Killed my birth mother, enslaved my biological father. She’d taken his pack, and for all I knew, she’d killed them alongside all the Handmaiden witches, just to avoid leaving “loose ends.”
Suddenly, I realized she must’ve organized the people who adopted me. Why else was Grant Oakley unable to find anything?
Aunt Esme. The Aurora witches pledged to the Solar Sovereign, right?
My anger grew even hotter when I thought of the woman I’d grown to love over my childhood.Esme is the one who hid my magic from me.Once, I was willing to believe she’d done it accidentally or that someone had tricked her into doing it, but I was certain now it’d been an order from the Solar Sovereign. That, and everything else my “aunt” had done—they had all been part of the plan.
So why did she even bother telling me stories about magic? About the Lunar Lord?The stories were too specific to be a coincidence, but how did they help further Zyanya’s plan? My eyes darted to where Esme still sat, motionless. I had so many questions, and it was possible I’d never be able to ask them.
I looked back at the Solar Sovereign and felt nothing but white-hot fury. She wasn’t just Fenris’s enemy; she was mine, too. She’d hurt everyone I loved, and she wasn’t even content with that. She somehow had much more planned.
My wolf snarled as if summoned by the intensity of my anger, and we agreed on the topic at hand—get the hell out of here and ruin Zyanya’s grand plan to get her power back. I took a breath, about to release control to my inner wolf. She was a step away from surging forward when Zyanya snapped her fingers.
“None of that,” she growled. “You may not shift until I give you permission, Celeste.”
Just like that, my wolf stopped dead in her tracks, and I screamed like I’d just been shocked, shaken, or someone had ripped rows of barbed wire across my skin—maybe all three. The sensation was sheer agony in a way I couldn’t even pinpoint anywhere on my body, and then it stopped as abruptly as it had come on, leaving me out of breath and itchy like I was covered in freshly healed burns. But I couldn’t even scratch my skin.
Zyanya laughed, sneering at me like I was something she’d found on the bottom of her heeled boot. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” She sniffed, nodding at me as I writhed, unable to stop it. “Imagine spending centuries like that, unable to take your true form.”
