Page 140 of Elven Crown

“That’s bullshit! All of it. Destiny. Duty. Swearing vows. That fucking tile. It’s all bullshit.Yousaw what was happening to me. You saw just as clearly as I did what I would have become. You knew. Youknow.”

The grief and loss of dredging this all back up to the surface now hit her like a train. Rebecca’s cheeks burned hot. Her body trembled. Stinging tears sprang to her eyes, but she would never let them fall. “And you came all this way to find me, to stand in front of me right now and try to convince me thatthat’swhere I belong?”

“That’s who you are,” Rowan replied, leaning toward her. “And believe me, if I thought we had more time, this would be different. But we don’t. I’m herenow.With this. Because it’s time for both of us to—”

“Fuck you!” she shouted, backing away from him until she felt steady enough to plant her feet again.. “No, Rowan. I refuse.”

He froze, staring at her as if she’d just screamed to him in a foreign tongue he’d never heard. As if she were a stranger parading around as Rebecca Bloodshadow.

As if she were astranger…

By all rights, she was.

Two hundred and seventy years. Anyone would become a stranger after that.

That pain behind his eyes—the willful ignorance, the complete lack of acknowledgement, despite everything he’d watched her endure for decades—hit her harder than any physical blow.

It broke her heart.

Yet even as she felt her blood boiling, her temperature rise, and her breath quicken until her pulse rushed in her ears, she also realized there was only one way to handle this.

If she didn’t do it now, she never would.

Taking another deep breath, she lifted her chin again and rolled her shoulders back. “You heard me. Irefuse.”

“Rebecca…”

“I no longer recognize the power of that tile,” she continued, feeling the growing power in her own voice and, more importantly, behind the words themselves. Because now she finally spoke the truth, all of it, instead of running away from it like she had for so long.

“It no longer holds power over me. Nor does the Blackmoon Scion.”

“Stop,” he commanded, though now his voice trembled. “You don’t mean it. You can’t mean any of this. Just…stop.”

“I mean every fucking word!” she screamed.

Without intending to, without consciously choosing it, she summoned her Bloodshadow magic so quickly and with so much desperate urgency, the deafening crack shattering across the room when she plunged the butt of her conjured Bloodshadow spear into the wooden floor at her feet said more than her words ever could.

The blast sent a rippling crackle of power and heat bursting away from her in an unmatched ring of strength. The ensuing shockwave from such a force whipped her hair around her face and rattled the door and the single window on the other side of the room in their frames.

All her righteous fury, her indignation, and her refusal of everything Rowan stood for now—everything for which she had once stood herself, alone, and at one point beside him—refueling her more than even her dedication to stay away. To stay hidden.

It was stronger even than the necessity of how she would survive in this world, beyond the Bloodshadow Court’s reach, because without this part of her, therewasno survival.

Letting her true power out like this, without having to hide it, without having to dampen who and what she had always been, felt like new life.

A gift and a curse.

Just one more impossible thing she shared with Rowan Blackmoon that could never and would never be.

“I’ve said it.” Rebecca’s voice echoed with an unnatural timber, even within the confines of her tiny private room. “I meant every word of it, and I swear By the Blood, Rowan, if you keep pushing this, I will do what I have to do tokeep my life.”

For the briefest flash of a moment as he stared at her and her power fully unleashed, she wondered if Rowan would try to challenge her right then and there.

It would have been a death sentence, and they both knew this too.

She could end him in a heartbeat, effortlessly and without hesitation.

Ifshe wanted.

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