Page 54 of The Panther's Price

Evryn’s lips parted, but no sound came.

Lucien let her go. Stepped back. Let the truth hit like a blade.

“I found him,” he said. “In the crypts. Not hurt. Not tortured. Just… dead. And not recently. They kept him like sometalisman, cloaked in stasis magic.”

She staggered against the wall. “No… no, she said…”

“She lied,” he said, softer now. “She’s been using you.”

Evryn shook her head like she could shake it off, but her hands were trembling. “No. He can’t—he wouldn’t just—Thalia said I wasn’t ready, that she was keeping me safe?—”

“Keeping youuseful,” Lucien bit. “As long as you believed he was alive, you’d keep playing her game.”

Tears gathered in her eyes, but she blinked them back, furious.

“Itrustedher.”

“I know.”

Evryn looked at him, voice raw. “And I trustedyou.”

Lucien didn’t look away.

He let her see it—all the pain, the guilt, the rage. The part of him that had crawled through blood and ash to reach her. The part that hadn’t stopped wanting to protect her even after she’d walked away.

“You can be furious with me. You can hate me. But right now, you’ve got to choose—her, and a lie that keeps breaking you... or me. And the truth.”

She shook. From grief, from fury, from fear.

She nodded. Once. Barely more than a breath.

Lucien took her hand. And together, they vanished.

TWENTY-FOUR

EVRYN

She didn’t cry.

Not when they escaped Crimson Hollow.

Not when the veil closed behind them like a dying breath.

Not even when Lucien helped her down the last moss-slick stone stair into the crypt where her nightmares had been waiting.

She didn’t cry when she saw Eamon. She didn’t scream. She just knelt, one hand over her mouth, the other reaching out—not to touch him, but tofeel.

To make sure the shadow of his presence wasn’t just buried beneath the stasis spell.

But he was gone. Truly gone.

She had felt it the moment Lucien said it, deep in her bones. HerSighthad known what her heart refused to accept.

Now, on the winding forest path past the Hollow, with the scent of wet bark and smoke thick in the air, Evryn still didn’t cry.

But gods, she wanted to.

Lucien walked ahead, close enough to reach her if danger stirred but far enough to give her silence. His coat was pulled high, shadows flickering at his shoulders like restless hounds.

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