Page 121 of Fury of the Bound
I never thought he was.
His expression hardens, voice dropping so low I have to lean in to hear it.
“I can’t ignore the whispers in my head telling me to kill you. To kill her. Rip her to pieces.”
He steps closer, body rigid as the wind picks up. “It’s taking everything I have not to walk through that door and do it.”
A chill creeps up my spine, but I hold my ground. His eyes seem haunted, no emotions clouding his face. Just like Vespera.
“But I know there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to,” he continues, jaw clenched. “That part is screaming to protect her. It’s like something’s rotting inside me, eating me alive from the inside out.”
His voice breaks just enough to sound human. Just enough to remind me this isn’t the Darian I trained with, the man I let in and now call family. This is something else—something twisted, infected.
“I’m fighting myself every damn second,” he admits, breath ragged. “But she needs to know she can’t fix this. She shouldn’t try.”
He stares at me, a grim finality in his tone.
“She needs to leave. All of you do. Before I can’t hold it back anymore, and I kill her.”
Chapter 32
RAVENA
Darkness pressed in from every angle—vast, suffocating, endless. It wasn’t just the absence of light; it felt alive, like it was breathing, watching… waiting. The landscape beneath my feet had been swallowed whole, reduced to a nightmare of jagged stone and silence.
Above, the moon loomed—bloated and red, a blood moon bleeding across the sky. Its sickly glow draped everything in shades of crimson, washing over the twisted spires that clawed at the heavens like the bones of a dead world. Shadows moved where they shouldn’t.
Eclipsara.
A realm that had forgotten the sun, where day never came and the sky bled red without end. The air was heavy, pulsing with old, vengeful magic. And in the heat of it all, he stood.
King Draeven.
A shadow carved from dark itself, cloaked in black and gold regal as he was terrifying. He didn’t need to speak to command. His soldiers were a silent wall behind him, steel and death wrapped in armour, their faces hidden, soulless. But even among them, Magnus stood out—tall, unmovable, a walking executioner. His very presence made my chest tighten.
But it wasn’t him that froze me.
It was her.
My mother. Selene.
She stood on the opposite side, facing them with fire in her eyes and blood on her hands. In her grip was the dagger, its purple blade catching the blood moon's light. The same one I carried, the last thing my mother gave to me to protect myself.
Her other hand hovered over the curve of her stomach—protective, possessive and desperate.
She was carrying me.
Even surrounded by death, standing before a King who has caused so much pain, she didn’t cower. She stood tall against him, showing no fear.
Only that fierce, quiet defiance glowing in her eyes like the last ember refusing to die in the endless dark of Eclipsara.
“Enough running, Selene.”
His voice slithered through the silence. “That thing inside you belongs to me. And I will have it—one way or another.”
He let the words hang there, thick and poisonous, before tilting his head, voice dropping to something colder.
“Even if I have to rip it out of you myself.”
