Page 213 of Problematic

Scarn crawled toward the throne he had promised himself. His hands slipped over teeth and broken fingers. Every reach higher, another dead hand locked around his wrist.

“No.” He shook his head hard enough to throw spit in my direction. “No, they’re dead.”

The ghosts climbed faster. The dead screamed his name. Scarn clawed at his eyes. Nails tore skin. Blood ran between his fingers while the nightmares pressed around his skull. I let the ghosts reach through his mind.

Liv inhaled beside me. Horror moved through the bond, followed by rage and a thread of reluctant pity. Her fingers touched my wrist.

The contact stopped me more effectively than silver. I eased back at the last second, leaving Scarn his sight. He collapsed on his side, sobbing, fingers slick with blood against his ruined face. His eyes remained in place, bloodshot and damaged, while his mind ran somewhere no army would follow. Laughter broke from him in small, high bursts.

“S-stop,” he said between giggles. “I’ll kn-kneel. I’ll give you the-the South. Anyth-thing.”

I crouched in front of him. The Hound crouched with me. “You put my mate on a screen. You put silver around my throat. You dressed my tower in your colors and believed fear made you a king.”

His lips moved without sound.

I let him see the red in my eyes through the dark. “I am fear.”

The nightmares showed him the ghosts reaching the top and pulling him beneath the bodies he had scaled. His scream tore apart halfway free.

When I stood, Scarn stayed curled on the floor, rocking, laughing under his breath, hands hovering near his face as though touching his own skin might bring them back. He remained alive only as a warning. Don’t threaten my mate.

Liv’s hand remained around my wrist. I turned toward her, power still crawling over me, the Hound breathing around my body. She had watched the worst part of me enter a man and tear through every locked room in his head. Her face had gone pale beneath the bruising. Her tail wound around one thigh.

She swallowed. “You left him alive.”

“Yes.”

“Was that for me?”

“Partly.”

“What was the other part?”

“Death ends things.” I glanced at Scarn’s shaking body. “I wanted him to remember.”

Her fingers tightened once before releasing me. “I’m still deciding how I feel about that.”

“I know.”

Noise rolled through the tower overhead, distant alarms and gunfire, stone trembling beneath our feet. None of it reached the space between her mouth and mine.

Sam cleared her throat behind us. “The tower is still full of hostile soldiers, and Scarn appears busy arguing with ghosts. Should we move?”

Liv stepped away first. “We’re moving.”

Kalon led the way, Sam and Mandi following. We climbed the foundation stairs while alarms blared through the tower. The service level had gone quiet in the wrong way. The Hound raised its head around me, ears flattening as the familiar pulse of fear reached through the walls.

My throat tightened. “They have Vale.”

Kalon turned to me. “We’re getting him?”

“Yes.”

Liv had walked into my prison rather than accept my loss. I would return everyone she brought into this tower alive, even if I had to tear the building apart.

Kalon smiled through the blood in his mouth.

“What did you do?” I asked.