Page 57 of Branded By Shadow
I was just the food.
22
His Eurydice
Cora
The stone was cold.
That was the first thing I could feel, a single, simple truth in a world that had just become impossible. I knelt where Damon had been consumed, my palms pressed flat against the polished marble of the amphitheater floor. It was just stone. There was no lingering warmth, no phantom vibration, no proof that a man, that a part of my own soul, had been unmade here only moments ago.
Around me, the world was a distant, muffled roar. Shouts. The sound of running feet. The low groans of the wounded. The air, heavy with the acrid smell of scorched magic, should have been suffocating. But my lungs felt hollow, as if they had forgottenhow to draw a proper breath. I was underwater, wrapped in a thick blanket of pure, absolute shock.
A gaping wound pulsed where our bond had lived. It was a numb, silent space, a place so barren and so empty my own nerve endings couldn’t even register the pain of it. My heart beat against my ribs, a frantic, stupid muscle that didn’t seem to understand that it was beating for nothing.
My gaze was fixed on a hairline crack in the marble, a dark, jagged line spidering out from where I knelt. I traced it with my finger, my mind clinging to the simple, physical reality of it.The floor is broken.It was a fact. Something I could touch. Unlike what had just happened, which my mind refused to hold. He was here. And now he was not. The two thoughts could not exist in the same space.
Shapes moved in my peripheral vision. Julian being helped away by other robed figures, his badly burned hands still smoking. The Artemis guard, smiling slightly, still clutching her silver bow in triumph. Marcus Dred, bruised, breaking free of the cracking black ice. They were just ghosts, echoes from a world that had ended moments ago. I saw them, but they didn’t feel real.
My fingers curled on the stone, a tremor starting in my hand. It was a small thing, a tiny fissure in the dam of my denial. The chill seeped into my skin. It was the cold of a place where a life had just been extinguished. The cold of a void. And deep inside me, something was beginning to scream.
The scream remained trapped in the underwater world of my mind. My body was a statue of grief, locked in place. But the tremor that had started in my fingers was spreading, a shudder working its way up my arms.
It was a particular sound that finally broke me. Not the shouts of the guards or the groans of the wounded, but a sharp, punishing click of heels on marble, approaching from behind. It was the sound of a world that was moving on, a world that was not ending. The sheer, infuriating normality of it was a violation.
“Cora, sweetheart,” Helena murmured, her voice thick with a maternal concern. Her hands fluttered toward my shoulders, her scent of expensive florals a cloying, sickening perfume in the choking air. “You’re in shock. You’re not thinking clearly. We need to get you away from here, somewhere safe where you can rest.”
Her touch wasn’t a comfort. It was a jolt of pure, white-hot agony, as if her skin were coated in acid. I snapped. The muffled roar of the world came rushing in, and the scream in my chest finally found a voice.
“Safe?” The word tasted like bile. I recoiled from her, stumbling to my feet. The ground tilted beneath me, but my rage was a better anchor than the stone had ever been. “You want to lecture me about safety?”
Helena pressed her lips together so tightly they went white. “I was trying to protect—”
“Don’t.” My gaze snapped from her face to the line of Artemis warriors. My fury, now unleashed, found its first and truest target. I saw the archer, her silver eyes watching me, unwavering. The woman who had fired the shot. “You killed him!” I screamed, the sound raw and torn, echoing off the ancient stone. “You stood there, and you killed him!”
The archer’s expression didn’t soften. “We saw a monster that needed to be put down.”
“He was not a monster!” I took a step toward her, a blind, useless lunge.
Julian moved to intercept me, holding his burned hands up in a placating gesture. “Dr. Ellis, what my sister says is true. What we saw… it was an abomination. An act of necessity.”
“Necessity?” I turned on him, my rage burning even brighter, fueled by his calm justification. “You let her kill him!”
“She saved your life.”
Alexander was pushing himself to his feet from near the amphitheater wall, where Damon’s power had thrown him. His golden hair was dusted with stone, and a long, dark tear ran through the shoulder of his expensive suit.
He moved to stand beside Helena, a portrait of controlled chaos, his face a mask of practiced, reasonable empathy. It was a masterful performance. The proprietary victor from theplatform was gone, replaced by the concerned politician. The lie was so good it made my stomach turn.
“She’s right, Cora,” he said, his tone soft, pitched to persuade the onlookers. “Listen to her. We all saw what that bond was doing to you. It was a parasite, draining your life force to sustain itself. It was killing you.”
The audacity of it stole the breath from my lungs. He stood there, the architect of my ruin, and dared to reframe my mutilation as a mercy.They don’t see a murder. They see a medical procedure. And he is the lead surgeon, explaining the necessity of the amputation to the grieving family.
“Killing me?” A laugh tore from my throat, sharp enough to draw blood.
He pressed forward, his Alpha presence rolling off him in waves. “Helena made a choice no one else was brave enough to make. She chose to save you. The threat is gone. You are safe. That is what matters.”
Something inside me snapped.
