“Let me go,” I ordered.
Moonlight-bright eyes locked onto mine. “No.”
“You need to let me go, Nyktos.”
“Or what?” One side of his lips curled up. “You’re going to slit my throat?”
Frustration and hopelessness crashed into a bitter tide of desperation and anger. “If that’s what it takes.”
“Then do it. Slit my throat.” He wrapped the braid around his hand, putting just enough pressure on my neck to force my head down toward his. “Just make sure you cut deep. To the spine. Otherwise, all you’ll accomplish is getting us both bloody.”
My heart lurched. He couldn’t be serious.
“Do it,” he growled, his lips peeling back over his fangs. “Severing my spine is the only opportunity you’ll get to make a run for it.”
A tremor hit my arm, and I swallowed a gasp as he lifted his head. A bead of shimmery, reddish-blue blood appeared on the side of his throat.
“But you’d better run fast. Because I won’t be down long,” he warned, those wildly churning eyes never leaving mine. “You’ll have about a minute. If that. But just so you know, you won’t make it out of the Shadowlands, liessa.”
Liessa.
It didn’t just mean Queen in old Primal language. It also meant something beautiful. Something powerful. Hearing him call me that rocked me.
Nyktos struck then.
Grasping the hand that held the dagger, he flipped me with such shocking ease that it was clear he could’ve done it at any moment.
“That wasn’t fair,” I cried out.
He came down over me within a heartbeat, trapping me. “What about me makes you think I’m fair?”
“Everything.” Panic was a strange thing, sucking away one’s strength one moment and giving near godlike power the next. I lifted my hips and clamped my legs down on his waist. I rolled him and popped to my feet with a shout, then jumped back, turning.
A low rumble from the sky shook the bare branches of the remaining trees, rattling them like dry bones. I looked up, catching only a brief glimpse of blackish-gray wings through the slowly drifting ash. Nektas. My heart seized—
Nyktos rose to one knee, twisting as he swept out his leg, catching mine. My feet went out from under me, and I hit the ground on my ass. Nyktos was fast—so damn fast. He rolled onto me again, but this time, he was smarter. One broad thigh wedged between mine as he captured both of my wrists, pinning them to the dry, dead grass as the shadow of a draken glided above us, coasting over the circle of land Nyktos had cleared in his rage.
“Drop it.” Eather spilled from Nyktos’s eyes and seeped under his skin, illuminating his veins as a thin trickle of blood coursed down his throat. “Drop the dagger, Sera. I don’t want to make you do it, but I will. Drop it.”
He could do just that, using compulsion. Panting, I forced my grip to relax. The hilt of the dagger slipped from my palm. It was over. Even if I managed to get free and somehow incapacitated Nyktos, I wouldn’t make it far. Not with Nektas in the air. “Happy?”
His eyes became pure silver with no discernible pupil—just glowing orbs. Those essence-lit veins continued spreading over his cheek and down his throat. In an instant, the minor wound there was gone. Only the faint trace of blood remained. “Tell me I’m wrong, Sera.”
My muscles went weak and my neck limp.
The essence bled out around him in thick tendrils of black laced with silver. Shadows churned under his skin. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me!” he shouted, the shadows spreading until his flesh was the color of midnight streaked with starlight, and the fingers around my wrists became as hard as shadowstone. “Tell me you were not going after Kolis!”
“I had to.”
“Wrong,” he snarled, the flash of fangs a shocking white against his skin.
My lips parted as he took his true form. Twin sweeping arcs rose behind him—as wide as he was tall. Solid, teaming masses of power that blocked out everything beyond him. I hadn’t been this close to him in the courtyard when he took this form, but I’d been close enough that I recognized the striking lines of his features beneath the churning, hard flesh: the height of his cheekbones, the lush, full lips, and thick, reddish-brown strands of hair that fell against the curve of his jaw.
“Whatever you think you need to do,” he said, his voice soft as a breath—it tripped up my heart even more—“whatever you believe you can accomplish, you are wrong.”
“How can you say that? I can stop him.” I trembled, the words spilling out of me. “You have to know that.”
“Turning yourself over to Kolis is not the answer.”
“You know it is!” I shouted. “Why else would your father put her soul in me? Why else would I have been trained to kill a Primal?”
His head was mere inches from mine, and the brightness of his eyes caused mine to water.
Instinct screamed at me to go quiet. That he was on the edge of losing whatever restraint he had. But I couldn’t. He had to understand that this was our only chance to stop Kolis. “I know what I’m facing.” I forced my voice to go steady and level like when I spoke to the wild kiyou wolf I had brought back to life in the Dark Elms. “But whatever happens to me will be worth it if I—”
Those twin arcs swept down, slamming into the ground and shaking the entire woods. Eather sparked from the tips of his wings, hitting the patches of dead, gray grass and turning it to ash.
“You h-have to understand.” I shuddered as frigid air blasted off him. “I’m his weakness. What I’ve been preparing for my whole life? It was for him. Not you.” My breath formed a misty, puffy cloud. “I can still try. Just help me get there, or…or let me go. Either one. I will fulfill my real destiny.”
Nyktos had gone silent.
I swallowed, hoping I was getting somewhere with him, praying to whatever Fates might be listening that he would understand. “You shouldn’t have to worry about hiding who I am. You’ll be free of me, and so will all those who seek shelter under your care. Everyone in the Shadowlands will be safer this way. You will be safer. No one else has to get hurt or die.”
“But you would be dead.” Nyktos spoke in a voice I barely recognized, his tone thicker and more guttural. “Kolis will destroy you.”
“That doesn’t matter—” I sucked in a breath when his wings lifted, whipping the strands of our hair across our faces as they spread out behind him.
“And you argue that you value your life.” A deep growl rumbled from his chest. “What little regard you have for it has never been more apparent than right now.”
“I’m going to die no matter what. The mortal realm will be lost. You can’t stop that. No one can. But I can at least do something about Kolis. Then, he won’t be able to hurt anyone again. He won’t be able to hurt you.”
He lowered his head even more, his mouth barely a breath away from mine. “I will gladly suffer anything Kolis dishes out as long as my blood is spilled instead of yours.”
I pressed into the ground, stunned. “Why? Why would you do that for me?”
“The embers of life and you—”
“Fuck the embers of life!” I pushed against his hold, getting nowhere, but something deep in me, something that had been there, tightening and building for fucking years, began to crack.
A messy knot of emotion seeped out, full of fear, need, shame, loneliness, sorrow, and a thousand other things I’d never been allowed to feel. Slices carved from me by all the times I’d been excluded by my family, treated like an unwanted guest, and seen as nothing more than a curse. Wounds made by my mother’s disappointment left to fester each time she looked at me as if she wished she never had to do so again. I was just a vessel full of deep scars left behind from the first life I’d taken and all the times after that, leaving the wrong kind of mark behind. I was nothing more than bruises on a blank canvas because I didn’t feel it. I didn’t mourn those losses. I didn’t care because no one else cared beyond what I could do for them.