Page 27 of Orc's Veil

“I am your sins made flesh. And I am coming for what you love.”

The mark blazes on my chest. Pain and heat and desperate, furious denial—the mate-claim refusing to let me fail, refusing to let the creature take what it’s claimed.

Then Eirene’s hand closes on mine.

Her blood—still wet from her earlier offerings—mingles with mine where our skin touches. The Veil shudders. Settles. The tear stops spreading.

And the Sovereign pauses.

“Interesting.”The creature’s silver eyes narrow.“Your bloods… balance. Poison and cure. Curse and blessing. How fascinating.”

It retreats. A single step back, toward the wound it emerged from. The stolen faces swirl across its surface—watching, calculating, planning.

“We will speak again, little witch. Little executioner.”The mother’s lullaby returns, soft and mocking. The same borrowed voice as before.

The Sovereign dissolves. Flows back into the tear like water running downhill, until nothing remains but the wound in reality and the fading echo of a stolen song.

The Veil screams one final time. Then falls silent.

Eirene’s handis still in mine. Our blood is still mixing. And somewhere in the darkness of the Shadow Court, the Umbral Sovereign waits for its next opportunity to strike.

“It spoke in their voices,” I hear myself say. “All of them. Everyone I’ve?—”

“I know.” Her grip tightens. “I heard them too. Everyone I’ve stolen from. Everyone the Veil has consumed.”

We stand there, surrounded by the echo of our sins, bound by blood and magic and the terrible knowledge of what we’ve created.

The Sovereign is made of us. Made of every life I’ve ended, every memory she’s stolen.

And it wants her.

I tighten my grip on her hand. Let the claiming pulse between us—pain and promise, curse and blessing, two broken people clinging to each other at the edge of the abyss.

Dawn has come, and I haven’t executed anyone.

The order will send more executioners. The Sovereign will return. The Veil will keep dying, and we’ll keep bleeding, and the darkness will keep pressing in from all sides.

But right now, in this moment, we’re alive.

It will have to be enough.

SEVENTEEN

EIRENE

The voices start three hours after the Sovereign retreats.

I’m at the central stone, checking the tear for signs of widening, when the first whisper curls through my mind. Not the Veil’s familiar hum—this is different. Sharper. Personal.

You took my daughter’s face from me.

I freeze. The voice is feminine, cracked with grief—a woman from a village three years past. Her daughter had wandered too close to the boundary, and I’d saved the girl by taking the mother’s memory of her child’s first smile.

The daughter lived. The mother never looked at her the same way again.

You stole my mother’s song.A different voice now—male, young, heavy with accusation. The father from yesterday. The one I saved.I can’t remember her voice anymore. Can’t hear her singing. You took that from me.

The stone is cool beneath my hands. It doesn’t help. The voices aren’t real. They’re echoes—stolen memories twisted into weapons, fragments of grief given teeth.