Page 216 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

Erissa halted.

“What’s this?” Ladomyr hissed and stormed forward, turning to Erissa, who’d gone sosopale—then blood red.

A flash of metal?—

Garrik grunted in agony as a blade sunk into his shoulder—just above his chest.

In a swift jerk, Erissa ripped the fabric of his sweat-soaked tunic, parting it at his heart.

Where the star-shaped scar should have been… Alora’s scar. The burn that belonged to her. It wasn’t there. Not the way it used to be.

Garrik’s focus wavered as his eyes narrowed on the blood spilling from his wound around the knife and pooling over dark ink. Narrowed at the twin to Alora’s mark that hadn’t been over her heart that morning.

At the flaming star encased in swirls of shadow.

Erissa let out a sound of hate. Of jealous, burninghate. And before Alora wrapped her mind around anything other than their markings, Ladomyr slammed his boot into Garrik’s jaw with one word on his lips.

Mates.

Garrik … he wasn’t moving.

She barely registered guardsmen storming inside. Barely heard Thalon’s screams.

Mates—mates.

Uncontrollable rage boiled across her flesh. Her soul. Alora’s head filled with roaring as her power rumbled beneath the poisons keeping them at bay. Her scream was deafening. Searing a wave of promised destruction across the mountain.

Mate.

My mate.

It was the last thing she thought as High Guardsmen dragged Garrik’s unconscious body through a pool of his blood. Signingtheir death missives as the High Fire-wielding Bitch of Elysian vowed to burn them all to ash.

Surrounded by darkness for hours, clad in nothing but her silken night robe and an endless throbbing on her face from Erissa’s slaps, Alora tried not to think of Garrik’s face.

Bone-white. Unmoving. Hardened in pain.

Tried not to hear the agony in the near-silent sounds of faeries sobbing and choked breaths echoing somewhere beside her.

Alora knew it was a dungeon. By the screech of rusted metal after they threw her into damp dirt and the turn of jangling keys, she speculated it was. Only when her hands wrapped around cold iron bars was she certain.

They had coerced her into the castle’s depths, separating her from Thalon immediately after they took Garrik.

And now, she counted the watery cadence like a heartbeat, turning the dirt in the corner of her cell to mud while she imagined it was Erissa’s blood—or Ladomyr’s. Or Silas’s and every starsdamned High Guardsman for what they’d done.

Hours later, by the count of the droplets, a lantern light glowed from farther down the hallway. Mere moments later, the harrowing grip of armed guardsmen ripped her from her cell and shoved her through the castle to a familiar set of doors.

Alora suppressed her smirk, remembering them. How the beauty of the hardwood glimmering with gold and rubies and branches webbing with emerald leaves shattered into splinters by her mate’s power when they’d first arrived.

Mate.

Her mate.Dying with every normal beat of his heart.

She didn’t have a moment to dwell on it. Those doors opened, and she was forced to stumble through the gathered court. Though the chatter was layered with laughter and whispers, she couldn’t determine of what entertained them. Only the ones who raised their noses at her and stared down the straight of it were easily interpreted—her.

The Dragon from her High Prince’s Shadow Order being dragged to the front of the throne room.

Ladomyr’s snicker was cruel and perverse, dragging shivers like scum and mildew over her skin as her knees slammed into the crimson rug. Garrik’s throne was transformed into warring bears, and a crown of golden tree branches and gemstones rested on Ladomyr’s bald head.

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