Page 157 of Claimed

‘She is suspended between states,’ Rowan told me on the first night.

‘Then do your fucking witchy job and bring her back.’

She looked at me with that infuriating witch calm, which prompted a less feral response. ‘Name your price, and it will be granted.’

Her ire eased then, enough for her to say, ‘If command could do this, you would have solved it by now.’

Then, all remnants of goodwill gone, I considered throwing her through the Heartshard Glass.

Eira would have objected. Loudly. With unnecessary commentary.

So Rowan remains alive.

I lower my mouth to Eira’s knuckles now and hold them there until her fingers warm beneath mine. ‘You will enjoy knowing how restrained I have been,’ I tell her. ‘Only two threats against Rowan’s life today. Both entirely reasonable.’

No answer.

The silence sinks teeth into my chest.

Fear comes in waves, and each wave has learned new cruelty. Sometimes it is sharp, sudden, an animal breaking against my ribs when her breathing changes. Sometimes it is quiet enough to feel like peace until I recognise its shape. Beneath both lives something stranger.

I am certain. Then I am afraid. Before I am hopeful. Again. A vicious cycle that has me in its brutal claws.

If she wakes, I will spend whatever remains of my existence proving that fate did not steal her choice from her when it gave her to me.

If she does not, I will follow.

Never has a vow settled in me with such simplicity. No dramatic grief or kingly declaration carved into stone. Merely fact. If my beloved hunter leaves this world and chooses Netheris, I will find her there. If she is lost beyond it, I will break what Gods remain until some road opens under my hands.

Perhaps that is madness. I have been called worse by better liars.

Her chest rises. Falls. Rises again. I hold her hand tighter, and I count each breath until the numbers blur.

Until I… I…

My eyes drift closed.

Until…

It happens like betrayal.

One instant, I am beside Eira, my hand on her body, my senses locked to her pulse. The next, sleep takes me by the throat and drags me under.

I fall.

And Netheris opens.

The underworld receives me with its familiar fireless cold, but the realm has changed since the ritual. The blood-glass plain is cracked. Red light spills through fissures beneath my feet. The River Veyr runs higher, black water lapping at bone-white shores, thick with hands pressing up from beneath the surface. The towers in the distance lean towards the centre of the dead kingdom, their candle-eye windows fixed upon the Blood Chrysalis hanging above the horizon.

Morrighan’s prison pulses like a second heart. Cracked. Bleeding light but not free. Waiting.

I land on the glass with fangs already down. ‘What the fuck do you want, Morrighan?’

Her laughter moves through the black halls of Netheris before she appears. And the dead shiver at the sound.

‘My beautiful king,’ she says. ‘Still so dramatic with names.’

She steps from a wound in the sky as if the realm itself births her. Black hair flows around her, threaded with crimson light. Her face is lush, flawless, and terrible, the face of a goddess who learned love by inventing hunger.