Page 4 of Bought By the Cerberus
I tried to dodge, but I was too exhausted and moved too slowly. His horn caught me in the side, punching through skin and muscle with a wet tearing sound. The impact drove me backward, his weight crashing down on top of me as we both hit the gore-slick ground.
Agony exploded through me, so intense I almost blacked out on the spot. This was it. This was how I would die. But even as darkness crept into the edges of my vision, my rage burned hotter than the pain.
I refused to die alone. I tightened my hold on the horn I’d torn from his head. With the last of my strength, I drove it deep into his throat.
Syagros let out a shocked grunt. Blood poured from the wound as he choked, his hands clawing at his ruined throat. He tried to speak, but only wet gasps emerged, growing weaker with each attempt.
“See you in the afterlife, you son of a diseased goat,” I snarled, twisting the horn deeper into his flesh.
He jerked back, and his remaining horn slid out of my body. It hurt so much, but I didn’t even care anymore. The knowledge of my triumph tasted much too sweet.
He tried to speak, but the words barely made it past his lips. “You... cursed...”
I smiled and watched the life drain out of his arrogant face with a glee I didn’t bother to hide. “This is for every day you made me feel worthless.”
Slowly, his struggles began to grow weaker. After what seemed like forever, he went still. His weight settled fully onto me, pinning me beneath his corpse.
Around us, the madness finally burned itself out. The clearing fell unnaturally quiet except for the crackling of dying fires. Blood pooled underneath me, warm and thick, soaking through my clothes and into the earth that had witnessed my shame. Each breath came harder than the last, shallow and ragged, sending fresh waves of agony through me.
Strangely, the physical pain didn’t bother me. If anything, all the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. Maybe this was always how it was supposed to end. My body could never give me the one thing that made a woman valuable. Why, then, was I even bothering to live?
My sisters had bled and grown round with children while I remained empty, barren as winter fields. I’d run away from them, perhaps hoping that if I tried hard enough, I’d find some reason to exist. I’d been a fool. The herbs had bought me time, but they couldn’t change what I was. A broken thing pretending to be whole.
The world began to blur at the edges, the sounds growing distant and muffled. The pain was beginning to fade away into numbness. “It’s better this way,” I murmured, even if there was no one there to hear me.
I’d been dead inside for years anyway. A ghost haunting my own life, pretending my empty womb didn’t make me less than whole. Now my body was finally catching up to what had always been true.
Darkness pressed in from all sides, soft and welcoming. I stopped fighting it.
My vision went dark, and I sank into nothing.
Chapter 2
Death-Touched
Theron
Therewasnothingmoresoothing and right than death. This was the first thing I’d learned as a newly woven, the first rule every monster in Asphodelia was taught. Death was our friend and our guardian, and it brought us both peace and sustenance.
And yet, the moment my team and I entered Agrion, I felt no such peace. The village clearing pulsed with energy, but it was not the clean, reverent power I harvested for Asphodelia. It was sharper, like it had teeth. My death sense screamed as we crested the ridge, leery of the strangeness.
A dryad’s body sprawled across an overturned fire pit, her wooden heart splintered by farming shears. Beside her, a faun’s throat gaped open, severed by his own ceremonial blade.
“Thanatos help us,” Skaros growled, his golden mane dark with shadow as he shifted to his humanoid form. “What happened here?”
I stepped over a woman who’d been disemboweled with sewing shears. “They tore each other apart. With farming tools, no less.”
Aion surveyed the scene, his bronze features impassive and unreadable. Underneath his metallic skin, his core pulsed in quiet agitation. “The death energy patterns are highly concentrated. Too focused for random mob violence.”
“They went completely feral,” Skaros called out. My manticore friend had always had a nose for these things. “Look at the wounds. They weren’t trying to disable or drive off. They were trying to destroy.”
I let the energy flow over me and shook off my unease. “They received Thanatos’s blessing, regardless. And now, they will give us their gift.”
My team spread out, death spheres ready for harvest. The crystalline orbs hummed softly as they began working on the corpses, glowing brighter with each extraction. Standard work, though nothing about this place felt standard.
Phonos landed heavily behind me, folding his black wings against his back. His gaze zeroed in on a particular corpse near the center of the clearing. “Look. That’s the same satyr noble who fled our battle on Shift Day.”
His keen assessment momentarily gave me pause. Caught up in the chaotic mess of the scene, I’d missed this interesting tidbit. I followed Phonos’s gaze to the dead satyr, and indeed, there he was. Syagros of the Moonhorn Clan.
