Good. I hope the truth cuts him deep.
I step closer, my blade raised and pointed at his chest, trembling with the force of everything I’m holding back.
“You knew what Sapphire meant to me,” I tell him, power raging inside me so strongly I feel like I might burst from it. “You knew what Zoey meant to her, and you still took her. You didn’t build a family, Aerix—you shattered one.”
He hesitates, his wings flaring. “That wasn’t?—”
“You want a family so badly?” I interrupt, seizing onto his flash of vulnerability. “You want connection? Then prove it. I made Mirena this same offer: ally the Night Court with the Winter and Summer Courts and stand with us against the Blood Coven.”
Aerix watches me carefully, a cold breeze blowing around him. I can practically see him wrestling with a lifetime of bitterness, with resentment etched deep into his bones.
Hope flickers in my chest. An agonizing possibility that he’ll yield and make the choice that will salvage us both.
But then, slowly, his expression hardens again.
“No.” He practically spits out the word. “I’d rather be dead than ally myself with the court that rejected me before I even had a chance to exist. A court that would never accept me, no matter what I did or who I became.”
“Then you’re choosing death,” I say quietly, my voice ringing with icy finality. “Because if you stand against us—if you choose the Blood Coven—there will be no family, Aerix. No dynasty. Just ashes, darkness, and the echo of your wasted choices.”
“Then there’s only one person in this world who’s my family now.” He glances at Zoey with such raw devotion it makes my chest ache. “She’s all I need. All I’ll ever need. She and I deserve power. Security. Safety. And I refuse to accept anything less for us—especially since it’s only a matter of time before the Blood Coven and the Revenants have endless power and hold every realm in our grasp.”
His words strike me like blades to the chest as his choice becomes clear. Because it’s a choice I won’t allow. The star touched were given their powers to stop Ambrogio and the Blood Coven, and if Aerix joins them, he will inevitably seek Sapphire’s death.
I will destroy every kingdom like I did here today before letting that happen.
Still, a sharp, aching regret twists in my heart as I imagine what it would have felt like to fight beside Aerix. To have a sibling who could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me in battle, someone who understood the darkness that shaped us both. A family that made sense, instead of the twisted mess I inherited.
But fate is rarely kind. And fantasy is just that—fantasy. Aerix chose this path, just how I’m choosing mine. And really, there’s only one true path for me—the one that leads to me being safe with Sapphire, no matter how much of myself I have to destroy to get there.
I lift my chin, hardening my resolve as frost coats my skin, ice reinforcing my blade. “I spent decades wondering what it would be like to have a sibling,” I admit the truth I’ve never dared to speak out loud. “Someone who’d stand with me, who would have been there for me when my father beat into me over and over again, when he made sure there was barely anything left in me to love. Someone who understood what it was like to be a prince in a court that treated me with distance masked as respect.”
“Don’t you meanourfather?” Aerix corrects me, which makes the storm inside me rage harder, pressing against my skin like a blizzard ready to break through.
Jagged spikes of ice explode across the floor. Water surges from the air, swirling around me in violent torrents that lash against the walls. My control is slipping—no, it’s already gone, ripped away by two words that shatter the last remnants of who I thought I was.
Our father.
Aerix steps back, uncertainty flashing across his face as my control unravels. Good. Let him see the damage he’s done—the brother he claims he wanted splintering into deadly fragments when presented with a cruel, brutal choice. Let him see the wreckage left behind when everything finally snaps.
The bond with Sapphire is impossible to find now. It’s like someone reached inside me and severed that fragile lifeline, tearing away every last scrap of comfort and leaving me spiraling into an abyss. I’m too consumed by a storm of agony, despair, and rage so intense it’s slicing through my soul.
If I don’t stop Aerix, he’ll kill Sapphire. If Sapphire dies, my soul will rip apart, shredding every piece of me, leaving nothing behind but a hollow, broken monster far worse than my father ever was. I got a taste of what that felt like when the dryad left an empty space where my love for Sapphire existed. And I know for certain that if Sapphire’s gone, nothing will be left of me anymore.
“So much power, so little control.” Aerix’s voice cuts through the howling storm that’s coming straight from me. “But this doesn’t have to end in blood. Join me, Brother. Joinus.”
His gaze flicks to Zoey, still bound by Sapphire’s magic, although the restraints are weakening as Sapphire divides her attention between holding Zoey down and trying to reach me through our bond.
But maybe it’s not that she can’t reach me. Maybe I don’t want her to. Because if she does, she might stop me from going through with what has to happen next.
And so, I force myself to look away from her, to stare back into my brother’s eyes, at the silver flecks that are the only evidence of who he once was and who he could have been to me if things had been different.
“No,” I manage to say, although the word feels torn from my throat, from my soul. “I will never join them and stand with you. Not now, and not ever.”
Because I’m exactly what my father made me: a weapon sharpened and honed by pain, loneliness, and self-destruction. And if this is how it ends, with my soul splintered apart andmy brother’s blood staining my blade, then maybe this final, horrifying act was always going to be my destiny.
SAPPHIRE
Ice shatters like deadly glass,water swirls in violent torrents, and the air turns razor-sharp. The tower walls creak and groan under the strain, hairline fractures spreading through stone that’s stood for centuries. A window explodes outward, sending shards flying out to the war-torn court below.
