Page 101 of The Madness Within

“I’m yours,” I gasped, breathless, raw, and wrecked. “And you’re mine, too.”

He slammed into me with no mercy, no patience, just pure, desperateneed.We weren’t gentle. We were fury. We were fire.

His hand fisted in my hair, my nails raked down his back, and every sound I made drove him deeper into the madness we’d built together.

Every thrust echoed with magic, our bond pulsing beneath our skin, glowing silver and violet where our bodies met.

We shattered together.

He moaned my name like it was holy.

I screamed his like it was a curse.

And when we finally lay still, tangled in each other, breath sharp and uneven, I didn’t say it.

Neither did he.

But he held me like we had.

And I didn’t let go.

Because tomorrow, the real war began.

And if I was going to burn… I was going to burn with him.

Chapter Forty-Five

??Smoke Before the Storm

Kreed

The mirror shattered as my fist flew through it.

A thousand reflections scattered across the floor, each one catching on the faint red glow simmering beneath my skin. My breath came fast, short, sharp pulls like a dying animal, but the rage?

That stayed steady.

“They know,” I snarled, turning toward the thing that roped me into this. “She fucking knows.”

Cassian, no, the demoninsidehim, didn’t flinch. Just leaned back in the high-backed chair like he owned the fucking world.

Which, in his mind, he did.

“Of course she knows,” he said calmly, dragging a clawed nail down the armrest, leaving a line of scorched velvet. “She’s the Watcher of the Veil. She was always going to figure it out. She was born to.”

“And Dorian?” I hissed. “He’s the Keeper. That smug bastard forged a bond with her. Do you realize what that means?”

The demon’s lips twisted into something almost resembling a grin. “That we’ll need to separate them. Painfully.”

I paced the length of the room, boots kicking up ash from the last body we burned. The hideout reeked of smoke, iron, and rotting magic, the byproduct of summoning what we did last week.

“They’ve found allies,” I spat. “The Bone Seer. The serpent bitch. That half-wraith Mirek. Even Noxen.”

Cassian finally looked up. His eyes, no longer Cassian’s soft blue, but pits of darkness threaded with red, narrow.

“Then let’s burn them down. One by one.”

I grinned, sharp and humorless. “You’re getting sloppy. The last creature you pushed through the Veil didn’t make it. Dorian and Ember tore it apart.”

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