Page 69

The weight of the revelations offered no quiet collapse. Valden seized control, weaponizing my confusion.

A crushing, unseen gravity, forged from pure infernal malice slammed against my shoulders. The sheer force of it drove me downward, and my knees struck the jagged stones. My spine felt as if it was splintering with agony. The dark swimming haze in the chamber was caused by white-hot pain in my body. I fought to keep my head raised against the oppressive magic, but he wrapped an invisible, suffocating grip around my mind, pulling with the singular intent to drag me alive into the abyss.

My muscles seized in desperate defiance as his monstrous presence expanded, a terrifying and ancient darkness that devoured my failing strength. I yielded under the impossible weight of his power and the damning truth of my bloodline. Lilith. The monster of legend. The mother of demons. My mother.

I choked on the sulfurous air, tasting my defeat.

“Why?” I whispered. “Why do you care?”

He stood over the pit, I at his feet. “Because I need to go back,” he said, his voice low and desperate. “I have been exiled on this mud ball for hundreds of years. I am starving. And I have been patiently waiting.” He looked at me with a hunger that had nothing to do with blood. “I need to return to the court. I need to return home.” He extended his hand. “And you are my ticket, Cassia. You are the mule and the price.” He smiled again. “We are going to Hell, and you are going to take us there.”

I looked at his straining and slightly shaking hands that controlled my power. At his face. And it finally clicked: the loathing he had for Remiel, the story I was told on the roof, and the rumors of his exile. He had been sentenced to the mortal realm for trying to create hybrids. And one was Isolde, of whom he had spoken.

But then I saw Lysanthe on that table. Her eyes going black. Her fear. I saw Remiel under me on that damned couch. Valden had killed my essence. He had tortured and killed my friend to turn me into a bus.

The rage did not flare hot this time. It went cold—absolute zero.

The crushing gravity of his malice was shattering against the waking void power in my blood. I forced my knees off the jagged stones and rose straight into the oppressive haze. Sentient shadows erupted from my core in a violent living tide and devoured the ambient light. The absolute pitch swallowed the ruined frescoes and drowned the cavernous chapel in suffocating darkness. Thick coils of my power slithered across the floor and wrapped tightly around his heavy boots. His infernal hold snapped under the sheer weight of my inheritance. I held his predatory stare with absolute freezing ruin.

“You want to go to Hell?”

My voice was not my own. It was the chorus again.

I stepped toward him. The horns pushed against my skin, and I let them come this time. I let the darkness take my eyes. I let the monster out of its cage.

“I will take you there,” I said.

I seized his outstretched hand and squeezed until the bones shattered with the wet snap of dry wood under an iron press. He gasped, his eyes widening, but not with pain. It was with the jarring confusion of a predator realizing he was now prey.

He tried to pull back, but I did not let go. Instead, I pulled him closer because his vampire strength was nothing more than dust against the hurricane surging through my veins.

“You want the door?” I whispered, my voice scraping like stone on stone. “I will give you the door.”

I drove my heel into the new stone without a spell or a key, pushing my will into the earth until the floor cracked open beneath us. A fissure ripped open to reveal not fire or brimstone but a tear into the fabric of the world, a silent and howling void that smelled of absolutely nothing.

The violent suction whipped his coat toward the crack and lashed his magnificent white hair across his face while he scrambled for purchase, trying to press himself against me.

“Shield me!” he screamed. “It will suck me in!”

I stared into his panicked eyes and watched the realization dawn on him before I said no.

“I will die! I will cease to exist because I have no soul to anchor me!”

“I know.” I leaned in until my horns grazed his forehead. “That is the point.”

He thrashed and struck my arm in a futile attempt to bite me, but the void was already stripping the magic from his veins and turning his perfect skin into graying flakes.

“Lysanthe,” I said, forcing his hands down toward the crack.

“No! Lilith will kill you! She will—”

“Lysanthe,” I repeated and shoved him into the abyss.

He did not fall so much as unravel, his legs dissolving into scattered ash and silence the moment his boots crossed the threshold. The void ate him from the feet up, consuming his high and thin scream as his chest disintegrated. His hand turned to dust while still crushed in mine, so I opened my fingers and watched the last of him swirl as a handful of gray powder.

Valden was gone—erased like a mistake corrected by the universe.

I stood by the edge of the crack as the void pulled at my clothes and whispered to the demon inside me to plunge. I looked down into that nothingness and decided it would not be today. My boot slammed onto the stone again to snap the crack shut, leaving me alone in the silent chapel.