Page 57 of Taloned Heart

The remaining eleven elves stayed where they were.

Lore handed him one of her knives and rotated her wrist. He heard an awful cracking noise, and then a continuous crunching as she moved it.

Perhaps they both should have prepared better for this. They were far too old for such things.

His mate cleared her throat and then said, “It’s a shame you didn’t go with your friends. That was a mistake.”

She lifted her hand and all the elves froze where they were. Their eyes bulged in their heads and he realized they couldn’t breathe. Their mouths dropped open, sucking at the air like fish before they fell to their knees. One by one.

“Lore?” he asked, his voice shaking with the violence of what she’d chosen to do.

This wasn’t her. She wasn’t the same woman who had urged them to be kind to people or to ignore them entirely. He remembered her not wanting anyone else to die and now...

Reality slammed back into him. The blood thirst drained away as he suddenly worried about what all of this would do to the woman he loved.

She met his gaze and then shook her head. “It’s all right.”

“Is it?”

A flash of sadness moved through her, and Lore’s shoulders rounded in despair. “I gave them a choice. And then I had to make one myself, Abraxas. I will not make the same mistake I did in the first war. I will lose no one else who is dear to me.”

He couldn’t blame her for that.

Abraxas nodded and moved toward the last room. Wrenching the door open, he saw Zephyr laid out on the floor. Poor boy didn’t even move when he heard them. They must have knocked him unconscious.

Without another thought, he ripped the door off its hinges so it wouldn’t be in their way as he carried Zephyr out. It was time to gather up their friend and take him somewhere safe.

CHAPTER22

Her heart hurt.

Every inch of her body felt wrong. She could feel the rage and anger crawling underneath her skin like another person had slipped inside her.

Lore wasn’t a monster. She didn’t kill everyone and anything who stood in her way. In fact, she’d fought her entire lifeagainstdoing that.

But then she remembered that elf who had hurt Zephyr all over again. She remembered the man’s expression as he’d enjoyed hurting a young man who had done nothing but good in his life. She’d realized in that moment that there was no saving people like that.

Or maybe there was saving them, but she didn’t have the patience or the time for their nonsense. All those elves stood between her and the boy who meant something to her. Zephyr, her little brother, a young man who sometimes felt like her son.

They had taken him from her, from his home, from the young woman who loved him. They had turned his life into something horrific and terrifying and she refused to let them continue doing so, even if that meant they had to die.

And so she let them die. She would usher them to that dark place with a smile on her face and a swift flick of her wrist.

The moment she saw Zephyr laying on the ground, she saw red again. Lore wanted to tear the stars from the very sky and rip it to shreds. She wanted to set this entire kingdom on fire because it was full of people just like them.

She saw the madness of this realm inside them. And worse, she saw her own childhood full of pain and hunger and sadness because no one would help a little girl who was left by her mother. No one cared for a half elf who had fought her entire life for scraps of food.

An entire kingdom had avoided her. Looked the other way when she was struggling because no one wanted to be the person with the soft touch who took her in. No one wanted to be the person responsible for her.

Lore recognized them as a group of people who thought maybe, just maybe, they had a choice. A group of people who would stop at nothing for equality and instead went too far, suddenly tearing the kingdom apart again.

Her heart ripped with each memory. It tore and shredded and blew into pieces because there was nothing she could do to stop them. At least, she hadn’t been able to back then.

Now? Now she could rip this kingdom apart and do exactly what the prophecy said she would. She would piece it back together after she tore it to shreds.

Abraxas knelt beside Zephyr and put his fingers on his neck. “Alive.”

“Good.” She hadn’t thought there was much of a chance for Margaret to kill the young man. After all, everyone still needed him alive. There were more humans to gather up, more people to prove that she was still a trustworthy person while murdering and stealing from the humans. “Can you carry him?”

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