Chapter 180: The Hollow King

Ivy's POV

The sound of it was paper-on-stone. I felt my cheek ring. For a second, my brain paused…like a badly buffered video…and then everything sped up.

“Keep quiet or I'll stitch your mouth up for good,” she yelled at me, her eyes filled with hatred and rage.

But it only made me bolder.

“You like being the martyr, don’t you?” I said. “Playing the tragic one so everyone feels sorry for you. Well…congratulations. You’re very convincing.For a second there,I thought you were really in charge,” I mocked her.

“You’re already dead in my eyes, so your words don't matter!” she hissed, each word a venomous promise. Her nails dug into the curve of my jaw like she was trying to carve a name there, but I shoved her off and she staggered with her one arm.

Pathetic.

“I’ve dreamt of this day, Aria. Of disgracing you. Of making you feel the same shame and the same hollow ache I swallowed because you just had to be the perfect daughter."

I don't even remember this bitch, and she's busy yapping like some villain before a revenge scene.

She smiled then…not a smile so much as a blade. “And since we’re twins, and people say we’re mirrors of one another… why don’t I make us look exactly the same?” She bared her teeth. “How about I cut your arm, too? Make you unmistakably like me.” She laughed, high and brittle, like someone who had broken too many times to sound sane.

The sound of it…the manic little bark…made something cold and clean click into place inside me.

I laughed too before I meant to, a short, cruel sound that bounced off the walls. I rubbed the stinging welt on my cheek where she had just hit me; her slap still smoked.

“You want me to look like you?” I said, letting the mockery drip. “Have you always been stupid, or are you still studying for the role?”

She slapped me again. The second hit was harder, angrier, and the room blurred for a heartbeat with the sting. My ears hummed. For a second the world narrowed to the circle of her ruined smile and the sharp, metallic tang of adrenaline at the back of my throat.

“Oh, that’s it!” My voice cracked like a whip, and the ground inside me shifted as my wolf surged forward, furious at the insult of being slapped twice…by a one-handed villain, no less.

Nyxara went from low growl to full-throttle carnivore. The wolf inside me didn’t ask permission. She launched angrily.

She hit Lila like a freight train in silk. We went down together as I went straight for her face. Since she has a disfigured hand, we could add a disfigured face to the list too.

Everyone in the hall froze, torn between duty, confusion and fear, their eyes wide. But Daniel only whistled, low and steady, like he’d been waiting for Nyxara to break loose…and was proud she finally did.”

My hands were on Lila’s mouth before my brain remembered it was polite to keep hands to yourself in royal settings. I was halfway to tugging a tooth from her fucking mouth, when a growl cut through the corridor like thunder dropped in a cup of tea.

It came from the far end of the hall, slow and deep and threaded with the same cedar-and-rain scent that had woken me up.

The sound carried down the stone, and every hair on my body stood up like someone had whispered the word thunder into my skin.

I looked up and Lila used that sliver of distraction to wriggle free, the performance already rehearsed: tears, a trembling hand pressed to her cheek, the kind of shameless theatre that made my skin crawl.

She ran straight into the arms of the voice…the voice that had made my nights jagged with fear and my suddenly making my body hum with something I’d never admit.

Nyxara growled low in my chest, the sound like a chain being tightened; mate, it chanted, jealousy sour and hot, coiling through my ribs until my heart felt like a thing that might tear itself loose.

Lila must have sensed a shift and pressed into him, hugging harder, burying her face at his collarbone as he lifted her like a child with one effortless arm and stepped into the light.

He was enormous…a mountain wrapped in waves of hair. His beard was tangled, his hair fell past his shoulders in greasy ropes. Sunken eyes stared out from a face that had been worn thin, like leather left too long in the sun. He looked like a shell that still breathed, hollowed from the inside but moving, still alive somehow.

His eyes slid over the room but did not settle; when they did fix, it was as if he saw only what Lila chose to be.

Something inside me cracked and then collapsed. Memory slammed into me…a flash of a smaller hand in his, of nights warmed by his laugh, of a scent that had haunted me for months.

“Leo?” I heard myself murmur in confusion, the sound small and stupid in the roar of the hall. My voice came out like a question to the wind, trying to find its place in the wreckage of recognition.

I should have been afraid. Instead the fear melted into a confusing, dangerous ache. I wanted him…not as the hunter from my nightmares, but as the soft center I had saved pieces of for myself. The thought made my wolf purr and something ancient and maternal unfurled in my belly.

Lila cooed dramatically. “My king, this wretch attacked me for no reason and your men stood by!” Her tears shone like contrived pearls. “She called me a freak because of my arm and…” Her voice broke on cue.

Beta Ezra moved like a struck animal, leaping forward with grief and pleading written all over him. “My king! You’re here! You’re out! How…” His hands reached, desperate and clumsy. He looked as brittle as he sounded, voice catching. “That’s an imposter, my king! I came back with your true mate…”

He turned to me, hope bleeding from his face, but I didn’t move. The world had gone paper-thin and Leo was all shadow and heat and the smell of him. I wanted to step into him, to touch his cheek, to press my mouth to the scar on his jaw and let all the supposed lost time stitch us together.

I wanted to hold him, to cradle him in arms that had belonged to a different life. Every rational part of me screamed to move, to claim, to wrench him away from Lila and prove with blood and bone that he was mine.

But he did not look at me.

His gaze was fixed on my sister, on the lie she dressed herself in. He held Lila as if she were the only thing that mattered, as if no other weight in the world existed. She nailed him with that practiced, glorious deceit, and he rewarded her with a kiss…ravenous, necessary, the way mouths meet when one soul sucks life from another.

Oh, I wanted to retch. The sight seared like acid. My vision narrowed until colors bled out and all I could see was her lips on him, his acceptance of the lie. I imagined tearing her other hand from its socket and shoving it into some dark pit. The image was violent, satisfying, and shocking in its simplicity.

Ezra’s voice cracked again, “My king—”

“It’s no use, Ezra,” the sorceress murmured, low and bitter. “He won’t hear you. He's been bewitched.”

‘Bewitched?’ I whispered to myself.

“What do you mean he won’t hear me? And why won't you do anything! I’m his beta! He has to hear me!” Ezra raged, fury boiling into panic.

The king raised a hand and the guards surged forward like predators sensing a stumble.

“What do you want me to do to them, my queen?” he asked Lila with that same hollow cadence that made my wolf thrumming with eagerness.