Page 96 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“Do it,” he growled through the chaos battering the room. This establishment was close to collapsing if even a fraction more power was released from the ruin.

His blue eyes glowed, swimming with ethereal power.

“Break the ruin, Faythe. It’s what she wants, and it’s inevitable.”

The ruin attacked that thought, slicing and clawing deeply into her mind and her flesh with no physical trace. She whimpered, feeling herself set alight.

Deep within the essence of the ruin, Faythe found a faint crack. All she would have to do was hook her magick into the thin crevice andpush.It would take every ounce of her being, and it could wipe out a devastating radius of innocent civilians. But she didn’t know what it made her when that wasn’t the thought that stopped her.

Reylan was so hauntingly beautiful. The malice was gone, and instead he almostpleadedwith her fiery gaze as it pierced his. Was he in pain? When he’d watched her all these weeks, so steely and pretending not to care, was he writhing inside to an unimaginable, unseen agony?

The door behind them slammed open, but Faythe couldn’t lose focus, or she risked letting go and causing a blast far worse than the first time she’d touched this ruin in the alley of Rhyenelle.

“What are you doing?” Zaiana yelled over the shadowy hurricane destroying the room. Faythe was surprised the walls still held up when the desk and the chest of drawers had become deadly splinters carried in the storm.

“Get out!” Faythe shouted back.

“You can’t harness the ruin! Stop her!” That was Kyleer.

“I can’t. Not this time.”

The flicker of hope that Zaiana could help her release this magick died out with those words.

“Then tell her how, dammit!”

“It’s not that easy!”

Reylan reached a hand up, so jarringly tender it widened her eyes when his fingers brushed soothingly over her cheek.

“Break it.”

“I don’t know if it’ll hurt you. Or…or kill you.”

He appeared the most convincing, as the Reylan she loved, but she couldn’t figure out if it was just a trick. That was what Marvellas wanted, but was it also the only way to get him back?

She’d put his life in danger, and Faythe was about to let go?—

“Don’t!” Zaiana yelled, far closer to her now.

“I have to let go.”

“You’ll collapse this place and several others like a house of cards if you do that so recklessly,” she hissed. “Untrained fool. What were you thinking?”

She hadn’t been thinking. All she wanted was to know if she could reach Reylan. All she believed was that if he was with her, maybe they could break it together, and he would be okay. They would win this twisted game before Marvellas got a hold of them both.

Now she couldfeelthis kind of magick was so uncertain and out of her depth, and she wouldn’t gamble his life before knowing more.

“I can’t hold on much longer,” she panted. Her gold tattoos torched like lines of fire over her arms and her spine, her skin slicked with sweat.

Zaiana said, “You’re fighting it, and let me tell you, it will always win. You have to be in control to lock the power back inside.”

“How do I do that?” Her words came sharp in her panic.

“Trick it into believing you are the dominant force.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Maybe not to your simple mind,” she snapped.

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