Page 81 of Too Dangerous To Die

“I do.” My voice is low. Certain. “They’ll try to kill me. Again.”

“Then why?—”

“Because I need the truth, Rhaegar,” I say, turning fully to him. “All of it. I need to know what she did, what I did, what they want from me—and why they couldn’t kill me before. If I’m going to defeat her, I need to understand what made her.”

He doesn’t argue.

He only watches me with that quiet, storm-filled expression I’ve come to understand meanshe’s already planning ten different ways to keep me alive.

Even if he disagrees.

Even if it breaks him.

“We leave at first light,” he says finally.

I nod once, and something fragile flickers between us. Not safety. Not peace.

But something like trust.

As we move through the narrow passage that leads out of the ruined heart of the Wraithborn sanctum, I glance one last time at the mark on my wrist. The glow is dim now, fading like a candle burning low—but it’s still there.

A reminder.

Of what I was and what I could become.

Of what Ichoosenot to be.

I close my fist over it. I am Nora.

And I will decide how this ends.

39

RHAEGAR

Ash still clings to us as we travel—the residue of magic, war, and the choices neither of us can unmake. It seeps into the folds of my cloak, tangles in Nora’s braid, coats the fragile silence between our footsteps with a weight we don't speak of. Not yet. Not while the wind carries the scent of old blood and older betrayal.

By the time we reach the edge of the Purna stronghold, night has swallowed the horizon whole. The stars hide behind thick clouds like frightened gods, and the air carries the sharp, metallic sting of warding spells long since faded. It’s quieter than it should be. Too quiet. The kind of silence that means something is waiting. Watching.

The terrain changes without warning—forest giving way to jagged stone, like the world itself was gutted and left to rot. Ruined obelisks lean like broken teeth around a vast chasm, the shattered remains of a bridge half-sunken into shadow. This place… it was once sacred. Before the war. Before the dark elves claimed it. Before Medea carved her mark into the bones of this land and cursed everything that dared to remember her.

Now it feels cursed in a different way. Abandoned not by time, but by mercy.

Nora pauses beside me, her gaze trained on the path that winds downward into the blackened cliffs. She doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t have to. Her magic hums beneath her skin like a storm still leashed—coiled and patient, but restless. I can feel it as surely as I feel the one buried in my own bones.

“This way,” I whisper, nodding toward the crag where the old smuggler’s tunnel still exists—buried beneath centuries of stone and spell. Few remember it. Fewer have survived it. But I’ve walked it before. Alone. With blood on my hands and Medea’s voice in my head.

We slip through the crevice one at a time, cloaks brushing the damp stone, the smell of wet earth and old decay curling around us like a warning. The tunnel mouth yawns like a throat that never learned how to scream. And I feel it immediately.

The echo.

It starts as a pulse in the back of my mind. Faint. Like a memory trying to claw its way free. I bite my lips and keep walking. One step. Then another. Nora is silent behind me, her breath steady, her footsteps soft and deliberate. She trusts me to lead. But I don’t trust the ground beneath our feet.

As we descend, the light fades completely. Only the faint glow of her sigils and the shimmer in my eyes guide us, casting long, shivering shadows across the walls. The stones down here bleed memory. Not metaphorically. Literally. The deeper we go, the more the walls begin to shift—subtle, at first. Cracks that weren’t there. Patterns in the stone that seem to crawl if you stare too long.

And then come the voices.

Not audible. Not in the air. They speak inside me.

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