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With my head bowed, I watched my tears strike the marble floor beneath me. Each drop felt like a mark of failure, disappearing into the pale veins of stone as my gaze searched them desperately. As though they might reveal the exact moment everything had gone wrong. The exact moment I had wasted a second on something that didn’t matter. The exact moment I had failed.

Because that was all it had been.

One second. One heartbeat. One single moment too late.

If I had been quicker…

Lazaros would still be alive.

Those potential lost moments spiraled around in my head. All those ‘what-ifs’. All those instances when I could have been faster. I should have recovered faster after Riley attacked me. Aster and I should have reached the Rift faster, crossed the Labyrinth faster, traveled through the Badlands faster. We should have bargained with the Gorgon King faster. Found the Weaver’s Torch faster. Fought the Typhon faster.

Everything should have happened faster.

Faster.

Faster.

Just one second faster.

An icy voice, sharp with vengeance and hatred, sliced through the fog consuming my thoughts.

I gasped, and my head snapped up.

“Cutting your head off would be too swift a death for you!”

My heart lurched violently against my ribs. That threat from Atlas only meant one thing,

Lazaros… he…

He was still alive.

A sight proven as my eyes narrowed in on him, kneeling before his brother, blood slipping between his fingers as both hands clamped around his throat. Slowly, almost painfully, he lifted his head to meet Atlas’s gaze with unfocused eyes.

Sickly black veins shimmered beneath his skin, spreading from the wound across his throat like cracks in glass filled with ink. Dark, tar-like blood seeped between his fingers as he struggled for each breath. The sound was wet and uneven, more instinct than effort, reminding me of a wounded animal fighting to survive.

Every movement felt wrong.

When he blinked, it was slow, delayed, as though his body and mind were no longer working together. His gaze drifted unfocused across the room, never quite settling. A terrible feeling twisted inside me that Lazaros was trapped somewhere deep within himself, forced to watch everything unfolding while something else pulled the strings.

Demetrios.

The same darkness that had twisted Riley now held Lazaros in its grip. Only this was worse. Because Riley had been controlled through a secondary host, one separated from the source by another vessel. But Lazaros was connected directly to it. Connected to the core of the corruption coursing through him, one that seemed far more volatile and far more complete.

The signs were impossible to miss.

Yet Atlas couldn’t see them.

Grief and betrayal had blinded him to everything except the villainous brother kneeling before him. I saw a victim. Atlas saw only treachery. A brother who had turned against him. A brother who deserved punishment.

Not a man being consumed from the inside out.

And strangely, that realization didn’t fill me with despair.

Watching Lazaros’s red-rimmed eyes stare back at Atlas without fear, without even the awareness that his brother had just slit his throat and was preparing to finish the job, should have broken my heart.

Instead, it gave me hope.

Because if Lazaros could be saved, then so could Riley.