Page 66 of Too Dangerous To Die

He meets my gaze, and something in his expression cracks. “She offered me freedom. Power. A life beyond the ruins. Beyond all this.”

“And…?”

“She said I could have it all,” he murmurs. “If I surrendered you.”

The world narrows to a sharp, burning point. “Did you… consider it?”

“No,” he says immediately, the word laced with something savage. “Gods, no.”

I want to believe him. I do.

But the way his jaw clenches says he’s still bleeding from the offer. That it wasn’t easy to reject.

“Why did she speak to you?” I whisper.

“Because we’re bound,” he replies. “Not just by the pact. Not just by blood. Something deeper. She sees it. She’s always seen it. I think… I think she remembers us both.”

A shiver runs down my spine.

We are shadows stitched into history. Wounds that never healed.

“She showed me a vision,” I admit. “Of what I could become. If I took the artifact for myself.”

He stiffens.

“I saw fire,” I say. “And thrones. And you, beside me. But not as you are. You were changed. Bound to me.”

“And you?”

I look away. “I didn’t look like me anymore.”

We’re quiet for a long time. The kind of silence that breathes between two people who might be about to destroy each other. Or save each other.

Finally, he draws the map from his cloak.

“She’s waiting for us,” he says. “But we’re not going for her. We’re going for the artifact.”

“And what happens when we find it?”

He doesn’t answer.

We travel in silence.

The Wastes part like an old wound, revealing a path we didn’t see before. The map guides us through ravines where the wind screams like a chorus of the damned, over broken stone bridges barely holding together, and through temples swallowed by time.

And then we find it.

A ruin half-buried in the earth, older than any I’ve seen. The air around it thrums with power—oppressive, cloying, seductive. My magic writhes inside me, half in pain, half in longing.

We step inside.

It’s not empty.

The Wraithborn wait within the shadows. Dozens of them. Their eyes glowing like blue flame, their bodies motionless, but alert.

And behind them… the artifact.

It floats above a stone altar etched with runes I can’t read but somehow understand. Blood has been spilled here. Oaths have been made here.

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