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Scraping my ragged claws over his eyes, I dig in until I feel one of them pop beneath my fingers. His scream is satisfying enough that even when he throws me off of him and I go flying into something sharp that stabs at my back, I can’t help but chuckle.
When I rise to my feet, I don’t see anyone but him in the room. The light around him is partly smashed, but there’s still not enough of a shadow for me to portal, so I stare at him.
“I did you a favor. Females simply get in the way. Like your mother. Now you don’t have to cater to that bitch’s whims. No, you can have whatever you want, do whatever you want…” His tone is slick as oil, trying to tempt out the greed in me, even as his breathing hitches from pain. Blood pools from his eye socket like rivers of red.
I just tuck my head lower and ram my antlers into my father, shoving him into the floor with a smash so violent that a piece of my horns chips off. “Without her to share it with…there’s nothing.”
“Looks like I’ll have to kill you the old-fashioned way. With violence,” he murmurs, having realized his magic no longer has any effect.
He shoves at me, his tail lashing at the side of my head and knocking me off him so that I go sliding across the floor.
I don’t bother responding to him, simply launching myself at him again. Scrabbling and punching, ignoring the pain billowing up inside each of my muscles, I slowly work himbackwards across the floor until I have him pressed up against a window.
For all his magic and manipulation, he’s an old monster. His fight isn’t what it once was.
When he realizes that I have him pinned, his good eye widens, and he starts to spit out manipulative pleas. “They’re all here. We could take them all out, and you could be the king?—”
“I don’t fucking care!” With a torching yell that burns my insides as if an inferno’s sweeping through me, I squeeze my father’s neck. “She was my mate!”
A swipe.
Barnabas wears a necklace of red ribbons.
I swipe again because it’s not enough.
The flesh peels away and reveals muscle. Still not enough.
His artery bends forward, the opened tube spurting green blood into my face with all the force of a fire hydrant from the before times.
Still not enough.
I swipe until I see bone.
Until his spine is exposed.
And then I grab hold of it with two hands and crack it.
Still, I’m not fucking appeased. I start to stab him with my claws, perforating his skin wherever I can reach.
To my horror, the ice monster beside Barnabas creates an ice sword out of thin air, and my stomach twists, certain I’m aboutto die by his hands. And I don’t even care enough to move out of the way.
“Try this.” The ice monster that Aliana called “Dad” startles me when he hands me a clear sword, hilt extended in my direction.
Without caring whether it’s a trick, without bothering to think, I grab the frozen sword and plunge it straight down into my father’s chest.
Empty.
His face is empty.
Body a shell.
Empty like I am as I slink down to my knees, covered in blood, sliding into a puddle of it, and not caring a whit about either one.
She’s gone.
He’s gone.
But mostly, she’s gone.
