Page 230 of Owned

“Fuck me sideways,” he whispered, and a laugh bubbled from his throat—not mocking but genuine, almost delighted. “Little Avril killed the big bad wolf and stole all his teeth. Greedy little thing.”

There was no disgust in him, no moral outrage, just a fascination that bordered on the morbid.

Through our bond, I caught flashes of his thoughts—calculations of how this changed the game, what opportunities had just opened, what new dangers might lurk.

“Did it hurt?” he asked, gesturing at the black tendrils that snaked over my collarbones and down between my breasts.

“Bastian,” Titus growled in warning, but I could hear the curiosity in his tone, too.

I flexed my fingers and watched the patterns shift with my movements. “Yes,” I answered simply. “And no.”

The blood bond hummed between us, stronger than before.

With Lucian’s death, something had changed in the magic—it no longer felt like a chain binding us together, where I held their leads like dogs, but like arteries connecting vital organs, each of us essential to the survival of the whole. Through this connection, I sensed their thoughts more clearly than ever before—not specific words, but intentions, emotions, reactions.

Titus was cautious, but there was a newfound respect that mingled with his uncertainty.

I had proven myself in ways he hadn’t thought possible.

Now he wondered what this meant for the hierarchy he’d taken for granted his entire life.

Valen was curious, and I could sense the way his mind raced to understand the implications of what I’d done. He saw possibilities where Titus saw complications, and potential where his elder brother saw risk. Yet beneath his intellectual fascination lurked something more personal—a deep-seated relief that Lucian was gone.

Bastian’s thoughts were the most chaotic—a swirling mess of excitement and opportunism. Yet there was something else there too, something that surprised me—a fierce, possessive pride.

I’d done what none of them had managed. I’d freed them all.

“You can hear us, can’t you?” Valen asked suddenly, his eyes narrowing. “Not just our voices—our thoughts.”

I nodded slowly, unwilling to lie to them. “Not words exactly. But your feelings. Your intentions.”

“The blood bond,” Titus muttered. “It’s stronger.”

“Because of what I took from him,” I confirmed, gesturing toward Lucian’s corpse. “His power... it enhanced everything.”

I could feel the weight of their gazes as they assessed this new version of me, trying to determine if I was still their Avril or if I had become something else entirely—something dangerous? Maybe. But not to them.

But I was both, wasn’t I?

Still me, but more.

Still theirs, but something beyond that, too.

“Why?” Titus asked finally. “Why didn’t you wait for us?”

“Because it was necessary,” I said, echoing my father’s words.

Silence fell between us, heavy and charged like the air before a lightning strike.

No one moved.

Lucian’s corpse was a grotesque centerpiece to our tableau—four figures frozen in a moment of terrible transformation. The candles sputtered in their holders, flames stretching toward.

The room itself seemed to awaken to my presence, responding to the new power that thrummed through my veins. Shadows peeled themselves from the corners and slithered across the floor to pool at my feet like loyal hounds.

Titus’s jaw clenched, his eyes never leaving mine despite the supernatural display unfolding around us. Something passed across his face—doubt, perhaps, or fear—before it was carefully tucked away behind a mask of stoicism. “So, it’s done. You’re Mistress of Withermarsh now.”

The title felt simultaneously too grand and too limiting for what I had become.

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