Chapter 207
Lorien POV
I gasped as Auren slammed into me, the force of him driving me to the floor. His weight pinned me, a warm shield between me and Lysandra’s flailing chain. A hard clang snapped across my skull and a hot sting bloomed at my hairline my fingers flew to the wound and came away slick with blood.
“I’m so sick of always being everyone’s second choice. You shouldn’t have marked her, Aurendil,” Lysandra snarled. Her voice turned into a guttural sound as something raw and animalistic threaded through it.
“Lorien!” Lucen barked, thrashing at his chains, and for a terrifying second I feared he’d break free and strike. When I saw his restraints hold, I scrambled up and rushed to Auren’s side.
Lysandra had wrapped the chain around his throat, dragging him back against the door while he shoved to pry her off. The guards were already closing on the door; it banged and rattled but Auren slammed into it once more to dislodge her hand.
My head throbbed as the blood dripped over my brow and into my eye. She couldn’t have him. I wouldn’t let her.
Auren’s face flushed red; his hand moved with a blur of motion and the edge of his claw opened a long welt along Lysandra’s thigh. She loosened her grip, only to brace and twist. Before he could wrench her fully free, my own hand lifted unthinking, instinctive.
The air shifted. The lights guttered as the magic inside me woke, hungry and quick. It prowled through the room like a thing with teeth, scenting the weakest place to feed. I felt it find Lysandra darkness pooling at the roots of her blood and I let it.
The shadows rose like smoke and then like hands. They curled up from the stone and wrapped around her, lifting her off Auren. Her legs kicked uselessly; the chain yanked from her ankle and hit the floor with a dull clang. The black mist licked at her skin, hungry and intimate, and I heard the faint, involuntary sound of her fear.
“You shouldn’t have touched him.” The words fell out of me as a whisper. The darkness answered with a hiss, pouring into her mouth, forcing itself down her throat like a living thing. Her eyes widened into a silent scream as the void filled her.
“Auren,” he croaked, voice thin as wire. Part of me wanted to tear my gaze away, to be at his side but the magic was alive and speaking through me, and I could not look away. “Baby, you have to let me go.”
His plea cut me. I wavered, wanting to know he would not be harmed by what I’d summoned. The shadows had already curled around his waist, slithering up his arms, coiling at his ankles. They held him, not with intent to maim but to bind like ropes of night.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Auren. Not you,” I said. Still, my pulse sang with a terrible, fierce joy as Lysandra’s body convulsed. Lucen groaned where he’d been slammed into the wall he’d been weakened by the struggle and could do nothing against this.
“Baby, let me go. You don’t need to have blood on your hands,” Auren said, steady despite the restraint. He sounded so calm; it made my resistance wobble. He tried, softly, to reach me. “You promised Queen Elara you wouldn’t let the darkness rule you. Fight it.”
The guards’ fists pounded the door with a frantic rhythm. The noise tore at my concentration. The shadows hated interruption; they were voracious, focused. My magic wanted the finality of blood and was furious at the delay.
“This isn’t what the darkness wants this is what I want,” I told the swirling night, my words blunt as a blade. “She shouldn’t have touched you. I warned her.”
Auren’s voice stayed soft. “She will be punished, Lorien. She will die but you don’t have to be the one.” His concern for me shone through the haze of fury. For a heartbeat I wanted to release it all, to let the darkness finish what it’d begun without hesitation.
Tears mixed with the blood on my face. “She was going to kill you,” I whispered. My nails dug into the air as the dark tightened. “She will be punished. She will die.”
“Lorien! NO!” Auren shouted and then the room convulsed with a crashing boom as the door exploded inward. The force knocked me back; instinct made me curl into myself and cover my head as the guards swarmed in.
I barely had time to recompose when a blur moved at the wall to my left. Lucen lunged free, his chain scraping the floor. He struck through Lysandra’s body like a living spear his hand punched through her back and out the front before her body could fall. He held her there, suspended, her chest gaping open and wet. In his palm the darkness seemed to recoil and melt away.
She dangled above the floor, heart exposed and still beating weakly. Blood slicked his fingers and ran down his arm. For a breathless second the world narrowed to that one obscene, holy image: Lucen holding what had been her heart.
The shadow I’d summoned dissolved around her as if repelled by the sudden violence. The room smelled of iron and smoke and the thin electric tang of spent magic. Auren’s bindings slackened as the shadows uncoiled, and he sagged against the wall, coughing air back into his lungs.
Everything was loud the guards shouting, boots on stone, men swearing. My knees trembled. My hands shook. I had expected the darkness to be a clean reaper; instead it had been a storm I barely guided, and Lucen’s brutal act had finished what my magic could not do without crossing a line I hadn’t fully seen.
I stared at the proof in Lucen’s hand, at Lysandra’s slack form, and felt a hollow, complicated thing widen inside me relief braided with an ugly, tired sorrow. The price had been paid. The room swam with the aftermath of choices made in the name of protection, vengeance, and survival.