Page 144 of Rise of the Siren Queen
I felt his desperation. Idrankit. It was intoxicating. The helplessness in his eyes, the despair wrapping around his spine—gods; itfedme.
She pleaded with me in broken sobs, the sounds barely scraping out of her throat. But her words were weightless.
I’d already decided.
There would be no salvation here. Only pain.
Only penance.
As she stumbled forward, dagger in hand, soul in tatters, I let myself feel it: the satisfaction. The power.
Her despair was art.
But this?
This was just the overture.
Because what I was about to do to Draven…
Would make the underworld weep.
“You three can have Thalor,” I murmured to my inner court, my voice as smooth as melody, yet laced with venom. I didn’t turn to look at them. I didn’t need to. They knew better than to question me.
My gaze remained locked on Ithra, who continued dashing my punishments into her son. Her limbs twitched with resistance, jerking in unnatural, puppet-like spasms as I pulled the strings tighter. She clawed at control, at dignity, atanything,but it slipped further away with every step she took toward her son.
Draven’s anguish was a song, and gods, how it played in perfect time with the rhythm of my pulse. Each note of his suffering plucked a string inside me I hadn’t known existed. I didn’t just hear his torment. Ifeltit.
“Ithra and Draven,” I said, my voice dipping lower, colder, darker. “They’re mine… and Adrian’s.”
A pause. The weight of their names lingered on my tongue like asacrament.
“They don’t get to die quickly,” I whispered. “They get tounderstand.”
Let them watch as I peeled back everything that made them whole. Feel the slow, creeping dread of their undoing. Let Adrian taste what it meant to burn someone from the inside out, not with fire, but with vengeance.
It was a ritual.
And they were the chosen sacrifices.
I didn’t even blink when Thalor’s screams ripped through the hall—high, sharp, guttural. A shriek carved from pure suffering. His agony echoed off the stone like a hymn to everything we had lost, and everything I was reclaiming. Blue lightning cracked through the air a moment later, sizzling and alive, its glow dancing like phantom fire across the walls. It was beautiful, divine, even. A crescendo of retribution.
A slow, savage smirk curled at the edge of my mouth. My court was painting justice in blood and pain, and gods, it was art. They had been silenced, broken, and denied this for too long. Now, they sang with fury.
I almost missed the shift—the whisper of movement beside me—until I felt it.
Adrian.
His arm slid around my waist, steady and possessive, his touch warm against the icy rage coiled in my spine. Then his lips found the scar on my shoulder. A ghosting brush that should have meant nothing—lost beneath the roaring storm inside me—but it wasn’t.
The touch struck me like lightning of another kind. Not pain. Not vengeance.
Tenderness.
I flinched.
Not from fear. Not from him. But because of that small, unexpected softness, something cracked through my fury like a fracture in black glass. The haze stuttered, flickering at the edges. For a heartbeat, the fire dimmed.
“Don’t give more to this bastard than he already took,” Adrian purred, his voice sliding into my mind like silk wrapped around a blade, seductive, commanding, impossible to ignore. “He isn’t worth losing your soul for.”
