Page 234 of The Tribrid Princess and the Taste of Chaos
“All I wanted was for you to trust in me. Have I not shown you I would have protected you?” I whisper.
Only silence remains, and I’m drowning in it.
I press my forehead to the ground, my body twitching uselessly against the paralysis. My fingers won’t close. My jaw won’t clench. But the pain that rips through me is full-bodied, raw, and ruined.
This isn’t heartbreak.
This is annihilation.
I would have laid my life at her feet.
I did.
And she took it… and walked away.
That thought hits me hard, and I see a flash of lightning in the sky above.
I feel the final flicker of something break inside of me, like the last heartbeat of a dying star.
As I lay there, I wonder why. Why did she do this?
“What kind of oath was worth tearing me apart for?” I mumble.
My thoughts are a storm inside me, swirling endlessly in my mind.
I know now. She chose this. This wasn’t a moment of weakness. It was planned. The powder. The spell. Her distance. She led me into a trap and made me believe that maybe, just maybe, love was enough.
“You lied,” I whisper again. “You lied, and I fucking believed you.”
What a fool I was.
And now I’m empty.
There’s no pain like this. Not even death could hurt worse. At least death is an end.
This?
This is fucking forever.
I don’t knowhow long had passed as I tried to focus my powers on getting my body to snap out of it, but it didn’t work, and I couldn’t shift either. My wolf had receded into the deepest part of my mind and didn’t want to come forward either.
Until I had heard shouting, before I was found and brought back to the mansion, where Delsanra is trying to fix this, but even she’s struggling. My mouth is too numb to even form words properly, but they’re already panicking over Sienna, realising she had drugged them.
They asked me what happened, but I couldn’t even communicate. Then the team returned from Mystic Academy, bloodied, drained, but victorious. I hear them say Dante was left behind to finish off as I try to focus.
“Sienna’s missing,” Delsanra says, her heart hammering as she grips Ahren’s arms. He looks pale as he staggers back and looks at me.
He must have felt it… the pack-link snap. His eyes ask me to tell him it’s not true, but I can’t.
“Jayce, what happened?” Dad asks me as he takes hold of my face, making me look up at him.
She’s gone,I say through the mind-link as Azura’s power swirls around me, and I feel the paralysis lift. I sit up, my hands shaking as I drop my head in them for a moment before I lean back, exhausted.
Azura sits beside me, placing a hand on my back. “Jayce, what happened?” she asks softly, worry in her eyes.
Dad looks up at Uncle Alejandro and Leo before his eyes land on Delsanra. “He said, she’s gone.”
“Gone the fuck where?” Uncle Alejandro asks as he wipes blood from his face.
