Page 122 of Rise of the Siren Queen
Afraid that this, this room, this moment, this man, was the end of us all.
“Sorry, baby, but this is your punishment,” Draven crooned, voice soaked in venomous amusement.
The wordbabydropped like acid in my ears. Mocking. Perverse. Familiar and warped beyond recognition.
His eyes, flat, lifeless things, held mine with all the warmth of a grave. There was no joy in them, no passion, not even hate. Just thedead calm of someone who’d already decided I wasn’t a person. Just a thing to break.
My pulse pounded in my throat, loud and erratic, like a war drum echoing inside a hollowed ribcage. His words replayed in jagged loops, carving into my skull, each repetition more unbearable than the last. My grandmother’s face flashed in my mind—stern, proud, untouchable. And then… gone. Ashes in his hand.
The panic clawed up first, bitter and suffocating, but it couldn’t hold. Not when the rage came.
It surged like a wall laced with fire, swallowing me whole. The fury that burned logic to ash and made room for only one truth:
I’m going to gut him with my father’s trident. I’ll watch the light leave his eyes, slow, deliberate, and I’ll relish it. Not mourn it. Not question it. His screams will be music. His death, a sacrament.
I should’ve ended him when I had the chance, ripped his mind apart that night when he touched my mom, when my father fell to his knees, when their blood coated the palace in liquid ruby.
Ihesitated. That hesitation is why my grandmother will suffer.
A voice cut through the tension like a blade dipped in frost.
“What is taking so long?”
The shadows parted, and Ithra stepped into view. Small. Elegant. Utterly wrong.
No.
My vision blurred at the edges, the room bending like it had slipped underwater. She was dead. She wasdead. Cast into the abyss. Her soul swallowed whole by magic and sealed beneath layers of salt and time.
But there she was, alive. Whole. Smirking.
My breath caught in my throat.No. No, no, no…
I must’ve whispered it, because Draven’s voice sliced in, smug and sharp enough to bleed.
“Oh yes, little Divinity. Banished indeed, but not dead.” He paced lazily, circling like a shark scenting blood. “While the sea witches brewed a potion to null Elora’s powers, I made sure they released my mother. A fair trade, don’t you think?”
His mother. His father.The monsters at the root of every curse were now parading their triumph.
This wasn’t a strategy. It was theater. A masterpiece of cruelty, scripted from the beginning, and I, stupidly, had played the part of the naïve heroine.
I stared at Ithra. Her skin untouched, her presence still so sharp it cut the air, and bile rose in my throat. Every inch of her screamed power. Defiance. Not a ghost. Not a shadow. A weapon sharpened and set loose.
My fists trembled at my sides, nails carving deep into my palms until the pain grounded me.
They’d planned this. Every move. Every loss. Every illusion of safety. And I… I had walked straight into it, unarmed and unprepared, believing that love was a shield.
Fool.
But that part of me, that soft, golden-hearted girl? She died four years ago.
And something darker was crawling out through the seams.
***
My grandmother was no longer the woman who raised me.
She lay crumpled on the marble floor, stripped of dignity and light, her skin, once luminous with age and power, now bruised and torn, as if the gods themselves had turned on her. Purple welts bloomed over her ribs like rotting flowers, the aftermath of Thalor’s fists after he joined Ithra in her merciless work.
