Page 177 of Vicious Is My Throne

“Please don’t hate me for this.” I eased him into a sitting position, gagging as bones cracked and shifted beneath his sallow skin, one wing hanging crooked. I hesitated then rubbed my thumb over his lips before I plunged it between them.

Raziel wasn’t even breathing, the entire side of his face and body lacerated. I pressed my fingers to his throat. Nothing.

“Gods, Raz. If this works, I’m going to totally kick your arse for playing the hero.” I rubbed Tristan’s blood all over his wounds then painted the inside of his mouth. When I checked again for a pulse, it was faint. But it was there.

I knelt beside Tavion, both hands dripping blood, when the inside of the cave hollowed out, my ears popping.

“What have you done?” Gelvira raged, hands clenched into fists as she swung her gaze around the utter destruction. Ignoring the four bodies.

Snagging on the absence of her brother.

“What needed done.” I took one last look at my mate, body smeared in wyvern blood, and wrapped my slippery fingers around my keystone, power echoing through my bones and turning my own blood to mist.

“You fucking killed him.” Her fury spiked the air, turning the atmosphere to a chilled heavy fog.

“I did.”

The cave turned dark as night, starry shadows spilling from her until I wondered if they would ever stop. Was Bexley right? Were the twins so closely intertwined she’d die now that her brother was gone?

Gelvira didn’t appear to be knocking on death’s door quite yet.

She looked pissed.

“That’s what happened with the witches, then. I should have known,” she mumbled to herself.

“You set up a diversion to keep me occupied while you came here and killed my brother.” She cocked her head slowly. “Ruthless. I underestimated you, sister. I underestimated all of you.”

While I wondered what, exactly, Bella’s diversion had been, Gelvira’s gaze skated over the cave again, only this time she paused on each of the prone forms, finally stopping on Tristan.

“If I’m going to die, it won’t be all alone, withering away in the dark.” Her smile was death and cruelty mixed into one. “I will take everything from you, sister. We will die here together, all of us, where our lives began.”

I lifted my chin, daring her to try.

“So it’s true. You can’t live without the monster your brother had become?”

“This would have been your fate, too, had you survived long enough,” she said steadily as if stating a simple fact.

“Life is cruel, even to beings like us. But you would have discovered that, while the universe changes around you, who you love and how you love never does.”

75

ANARIA

When Gelvira turned her attention on Tristan, her body wreathed in shadow, my magic rallied, anticipating the moment she reached down inside herself and yanked up her power.

I gripped the keystone, power flooding through me when she flung her spear of darkness toward the downed wyvern.

Her shadows struck a wall of solid ice, an impenetrable barrier between her rage and Tristan, who had smoke spilling from his nostrils.

“I won’t let you touch him. Or any of them.”

I didn’t allow myself to look at Tavion. Didn’t allow myself to even wonder if the blood had worked and he was alive. Because if I took my eyes off my sister for even a moment, we were all dead.

“You’re weak,” she mocked. “You spilled all your magic like a teenager’s first time in a female. You can’t hope to face me and survive.”

“First of all, that’s a crude analogy, even for you. Second, I will totally kick your arse.” Because there was no delaying this fight.

I finished this here and now.

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