I move to the door and twist the handle. Locked.
I glance back. She’s sitting upright now, her fists clenched in the blanket. Her posture is coiled like a blade ready to strike.
“You hate that I’m greater than you,” she seethes. “You’re a murderer, Cage. Just like me. Your blood may be arcane, yourpower sharp, but I’veneverkilled without a purpose. I never butchered so many that a coven barely survived. Your hunger? Your destruction? It’s worse than mine ever was.”
She laughs, sharp and cruel, and the sound cuts through the tension like shattered glass.
Anyone can justify their sins. She just wrapped hers in pretty words. Her so-called morality is nothing more than a painted excuse.
Still, her accusation lands, causing me to pause for a split second.
“The villages you’ve pillaged—ripping people from their homes? The abusive cycle you feed within your coven—on the women you call sisters?” I snarl. “I pray to never have a family like yours.
I let the silence stretch, just long enough to sting.
“But you don’t really have any family left, do you, Millie?”
She tilts her chin, regal and unyielding. Defiant.
“No,” she breathes. “You made sure of that. Even for yourself, am I right?”
Her smile is slow—too knowing. And when it lands, it lands hard.
My jaw clenches, and my grip on the doorknob tightens until my knuckles go stark white. Blood stops pumping; my hand tingles.
She’s not wrong. I ended up in that coven because I obliterated everything that tied me to another life. My magic was volatile, raw, and unchecked. And I was young.
I still remember the moment it happened: obsidian spikes rising from the ground with the snap of my fear; and my mother impaled, gasping for the breath she couldn’t catch. Even dying, she told me it wasn’t my fault.
Five days.
Five days of my mother’s cold skin against mine.
Five days of intimate education on how the smell of a human body changes as it decomposes.
I remained curled between their bodies for five days, my mother and father lifeless beside me. I didn’t eat. I barely breathed. Every breath I took was drenched in the putrid rot of them mixed with the piss and shit their bodies expelled.
Every breath I took felt stolen, unearned. I was alive, but they were dead.
Because of me.
Then Nora found me.
She promised safety and to help me control the storm growing inside me. I believed her. Gods, Iwantedto believe her.
She trained me, molded me. She said it was for my own good and that the chains were necessary.
And for a while, I believed it—that is, until the night my magic turned against her.
Until Vyraxis.
Only then did I escape, and only then did I realize it had all been a lie. I wasn’t trained. I was controlled and abused. I wasused.
Millicent? She’s still in it, still drowning in that same indoctrination.
I doubt she’s ever left the coven walls long enough toknowwho she’s without Nora’s voice whispering in her ear.
“Guilty as charged.” I turn toward her, raising both hands as I lean back against the door. “Tell me, Millicent: have you ever actuallyleftyour coven?”
