Chapter 81
Eden
Pain is a strange thing. It doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it whispers. Right now, it whispers through every inch of my body and won’t let me more i
I can’t move, or even think.
The only thing I’m allowed is to feel and I feel everything.
The blood pouring from my shoulder. Mara’s magic eating my flesh. The pounding in my head from being slammed into the frozen earth. The sharp ache. in my ribs. At least one is broken. Maybe more.
My nine tails are on the ground,no longer able to rise since they’re soaked in grief.
Axel died for me.
Mara killed him.
She is standing above me, gloating.
Her gown sparkle with wrong magic. Her mouth is stained crimson. I’m going to be her next victim since my protector is gone. I’m all on my own.
“So much effort,” she says, circling me slowly. “So much loyalty wasted. Isn’t it funny? All these wolves dying for a girl who doesn’t even know what she truly is.”
I know what I am–a fox–but when I try to speak, not a sound comes out. My throat is thick with blood.
Mara crouches, her eyes glowing like twin moons dipped in venom. Her fingers trail down my cheek. Not to soothe, but to ridicule me.
“Do you want to see him again?” she asks sweetly. “I can arrange that. I’ll kill you gently, if you ask nicely.”
I spit blood at her and she laughs.
“You’re still a little firecracker, aren’t you?” she muses. “Good. I’ll enjoy breaking you.”
She raises her hand, and shadows ripple out from her fingers like dogs made of smoke. They form claws. Fangs.
I force myself to stand. My vision sways, but I rise to one knee. My tails flare. Weak, but not extinguished.
“You’re not going to win,” I whisper.
She laughs again. “Darling, I already have.”
She strikes and I roll, tails sweeping upward to block her attack. Magic sparks. The impact rattles my bones. I scream, launching a concentrated bolt of foxfire straight to her heart.
She deflects it with a wing. It looks easy and so she laughs as if she has already killed me.
That’s when I launch myself at her. We clash again/Again and again. It’s a dance with tails versus wings, fire against shadow. Every impact sends a shockwave through the earth. Wolves scatter. The portal pulses wider.
Mara grabs one of my tails and yanks. I scream. She swings me around like a ragdoll and slams me into the ground. Ice cracks. My shoulder dislocates.
But I use the momentum. I twist. I aim one last, desperate blast of foxfire into her face.
It hits.
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Chapter 81
She roars, staggering back. Her skin sizzles. Blisters bloom across her cheekbone,
I collapse again, I can’t move since I’m bleeding from everywhere.
Mara stares down at my broken body, panting now until her lips form a sickly smile.
“You really are his mate,” she murmurs. “I wonder how he’ll react when I bring him your heart,”
She raises her hand.
I brace for it. My body curls on instinct. tree.
This is how I die. With Axel’s blood still steaming on the ground, with Elvira unconscious beside a broken
I close my eyes and the world holds its breath.
Then something splits the sky in half and the
from which Azriel steps through.
Still my mate, but no longer the male I knew.
thickens with power that hums with rage. /look in that direction, staring at a jagged tear in the world
He is more powerful. Terrifyingly so. Wind and shadows are curling from his body like smoke clinging to embers. His armor pulses with runes that shimmer like they’re alive. Sigils crawl across his skin. His black wings stretch wide, feathers made of night.
His violet eyes are glowing. Blank. Terrifying. No emotion living in that gaze, but power.
Mara doesn’t like that.
She takes one step back, her face twisting with unease when she sees her brother.
Azriel doesn’t speak. He lifts a hand, and the wind shrieks.
Mara flies backward, slammed into a tree. The trunk splits. Bark explodes. She crashes to the ground, coughing blood with her dark hair in the face.
“You,” she hisses. “How can you fight me when I know your name? Why won’t you listen?”
Azriel breathes a laugh. “A king never bows.”
The shadows snicker and Azriel smiles at one before blowing a kiss at
devour her.
This
palm. The shadow immediately slither forward. Not to strike Mara, but to
The fairy queen screams, casting bolt after bolt of deadly magic. One tears open the sky. One levels an entire ridge.
But the wind and shadows can’t be destroyed. Azriel can’t either. He absorbs it all. His body doesn’t even flinch. The magic sinks into his skin like water
into dry earth.
“Interesting how I was once afraid of you,” Azriel muses with a curl to the corner of his lips. “You’re so weak, sister. It won’t be fun ending you at all.”
He says that and then…
He moves.
One moment he is standing still and in the next, he is holding his sister by the throat.
Mara tries to breathe, clawing at him to release/her.
He doesn’t blink.
“You touched what is mine,” he says. The calm in his voice more terrifying than rage. It holds no room for mercy. “And now you’re going to pay.”
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Chapter 81
Mara spits blood in his face.
He smiles.
And then the shadows surge.
They pour into her mouth, her eyes, her lungs. Her body convulses. Her skin blackens from within. She collapses.
He lets her drop like garbage.
Mara is gone.
Then, slowly, he turns.
The battlefield is silent. No wolves move. No monsters breathe. All of reality seems to pause.
Azriel walks toward me and I notice how the snow turns to ash around his feet. The wind doesn’t even touch him. The entire world seems to recoil frota
him.
He kneels beside me. There is no softness in him. Only focus in this violet eyes that regard me in silence.
I want to speak. My lips part. But blood spills out instead of words.
His hand hovers over my chest, glowing with swirling shadow–light.
“You will not die here,” he murmurs. “I won’t allow it.”
His fingers brush my temple. Magic floods me and I can feel my wounds healing.
“You belong to me, Eden,” he says, voice like a vow, like a curse. “And I will reduce this world to ash before I let it steal you again.”
I want to tell him no. That he can’t claim me like this. That I’m not a possession. I want to reach for the boy I knew, the male I loved–the one who once held me gently and kissed my fears away.
But that boy is gone.
And this creature in his place… he loves me too. In his way. Desperate. Wild. Obsessive. The kind of love that would rather see the world burn than lose what it covets.
His shadows cradle me like vines, like chains, like a crown he’s placing on a queen he refuses to let fall.
“I will keep you safe,” he whispers. “Even if I have to become the villain in your story to do it.”
And as my vision blurs, as the pain drags me down, I realize he means it.
Every word.
The last thing I feel is his magic wrapping around me, wrapping through me, anchoring itself to my soul.
Ther
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