Page 111 of Shattered & Returned

They charged. Fifty yards. Forty.

My blood hit the earth—and the groundmoved. Thorned vines shot up where each drop fell, coiling around my legs in a grotesque embrace. A dozen serrated tendrils rose, swaying like cobras tasting the air. They were mine. Born from my rage, my pain, loyal as hounds and twice as vicious.

I laughed coldly. “Come and die!”

My magic was almost spent. My body screamed. But I’d burn out laughing as I watched thembleed.

Shadows swept across the rocks. I stumbled, but an arm hooked around my waist, steadying me.

Nero.

At his presence, my thorned vines slithered back into the earth, conserving what little strength I had left.

A hellhound’s howl split the air, followed by screams.

Morrigan and the hellhound tore into the bounty hunters, herding them with ruthless efficiency as Nero’s shadows closed in.

I blinked up at my savior. Fear and exhaustion carved lines into his face, blood streaking his black armor. Battle wounds mapped his body—deep gashes on his arms, his forehead, hissharp cheekbones. The kind of injuries that would’ve killed a lesser man.

“You came,” I breathed.

“Always, my brave flower.” His voice cracked, relief, fury, and raw gratitude glistening in his winter-green eyes.

Then his gaze snapped to the carnage behind us.

The fight was already over.

Five bodies. Not corpses yet. Not quite.

One man hung in ribbons of flesh, the hellhound’s work.

Another clutched his split belly, entrails slithering through his fingers.

A third whimpered through a mouthful of blood, his tongue severed, his eye sockets hollow.

The fourth twitched limbless in the dirt.

And the woman’s ribcage yawned open, organs glistening under the fading light.

A butcher’s tableau.

I didn’t look away.

“These fuckers will die slow.”Nero’s voice could have frozen hell itself.“Let their corpses rot here as a warning. Touch what’s mine, and this is your fucking dark fate.”

He’d just shown me the depths of his brutality. Yet I didn’t flinch. Didn’t recoil. Even with blood still cooling on my skin and violence curdling in my stomach, I clung to him tighter.

Because this carnage? It wasfor me.

A thought flickered in my pain-filled head: we should interrogate them, trace this back to whoever sent them, but their broken bodies were beyond answering. And I was too spent to care.

Only one truth mattered now, blazing through the pain and exhaustion—Nero wasn’t the killer. He’d never murdered any of those redheads.

I shouldn’t have doubted him. If he wanted me dead, I’d have been dead a long time ago. He might be brutal and complicated, but he was always direct and never subtle.

Those victim photos weren’t trophies. They were evidence. He’d been hunting these butchers all along, carrying some terror he couldn’t name. And when he’d found me alive by that well, the look in his eyes made my heart break for him.

No one could fake that storm of rage, joy, and relief.

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