Page 90 of Too Dangerous To Die

Because she used it once.

And I remember now.

I take a deep breath and close my eyes, laying my palm against the cold stone of his chest. The fracture beneath it pulses faintly, like the last beat of a dying heart. My magic stirs—weak, but intact. Still mine.

I dig my fingers into the earth beside me, clawing through moss and root until I find stone. Black and veined with faint amber lines. A focus. It doesn’t need to be pure. It just needs to be ancient.

I draw it to me, place it between us.

And I begin.

The words pour from my lips in the old tongue, not Medea’s corrupted version, but the one buried beneath layers of blood and bone. My voice shakes at first, but then it finds rhythm, cadence—will.Magic blooms like poison in reverse, seeping from my fingertips, from the center of my chest, from the soul I’m about to carve in half.

“I offer what was never meant to be given…”I whisper, the rite flowing through me like a storm barely leashed.“A life split. A flame divided. One heart, halved.”

My skin burns.

My vision blurs.

But I keep going.

“Take what you need to preserve what should not yet be taken.”

The air thickens.

The stone glows.

And then the pain hits.

It’s not fire.

It’smemory.

Every moment of my life floods my body at once—my childhood in the Purna sanctum, my first betrayal, the day I met Rhaegar, the nights I didn’t sleep because I was too afraid of what I might become.

And then…

Him.

His voice. His touch. The way he looked at me like I was worth saving.

I cry out as the rite takes hold—something inside me snapping, not in pain but incost.My magic surges outward, not alone this time, but joined with something deeper.

Somethingreal.

A golden light bursts from my chest, tethering me to him, wrapping his cracked, still body in a cocoon of power laced with grief and devotion.

The ritual seizes.

I scream.

And then, nothing.

Silence, again.

The stone fades.

The tether dims.

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