“Tuck helped me make it,” she said, placing it gently on the ground. “He said Archer carried his heart on his sleeve, so I thought…” She trailed off, her lower lip trembling.
I reached for her, pulling her against my side. “It’s perfect. He would love it.”
She nodded against my shoulder, her fingers still resting on the carving. “I miss him.”
“I know, Quilly. We miss him too.”
The three of us knelt there in silence, surrounded by death and decay, united by loss and the fierce, burning need to make it right somehow. To make it matter.
Behind us, I heard the soft clearing of a throat. Tuck stood at the garden’s edge. “The Gods are waiting. It’s time.”
I rose slowly, helping Quill to her feet, feeling Thorne do the same beside me. The small wooden heart remained on the ground, a solitary marker of life and love in this place of death.
“We’re coming,” I said, squaring my shoulders beneath the weight of the crown I never wanted.
As we walked away, I felt the power stirring within me, the dual forces of renewal and destruction. The stolen mortal power. The simplicity of the Huntress power. All of it. It was time to turn my attention to destruction.
To vengeance.
To making them all pay for what they had taken from us.
For Archer, who had deserved so much more than the brief life he had been given.
For Quill, who would grow up without his laughter, his guidance, his love.
For myself, left to navigate a world that made no sense without him in it.
For all of us, broken in ways that could never fully heal.
They would pay. And I would be the one to collect the debt.
I touched the crown, feeling it transform in my mind from a burden into a weapon. Acting monarch, they had called me.
I would act, indeed.
Starting right fucking now.
57
Thorne
The gods filed into the council chamber like vultures to a corpse. They settled around the ancient table with their false solemnity, as if this were any ordinary meeting. As if the world hadn’t fucking shattered days ago. As if Archer Bramwell wasn’t dead and hearts weren’t aching while they played at politics.
Minerva settled into her seat with quiet dignity. Tuck stood behind her, arms crossed, his usual stoic mask firmly in place though the grief in his eyes betrayed him. I recognized that look, the same hollow emptiness I saw every time I caught my own reflection. Loving mortals was hard. We’d been on this cycle forever, but it never got easier. Especially with a life cut far too short.
Raeth arrived next, his calculating gaze sweeping the room, lingering on Paesha with poorly disguised hunger. My power flared instinctively, ready to rip his fucking throat out if he so much as breathed wrong in her direction. She was mine. And that child’s.
They all knew of Archer’s death, of course. The “unfortunate passing” of Stirling’s young king had spread through the realms with remarkable speed. But they knew only the lie we’d crafted:that he’d been found unresponsive in his chambers, that no one knew what had happened. A convenient lie to hide the truth until Paesha was ready to give it. Until she was ready to unleash hell. Likely in less than an hour. She’d spent days holding back. Whispering to voices that seemed quieter in her grief, but the swell of her power was pressing on her and she was done with all of it.
My Ever sat at the head of the table, her face a carefully composed mask that revealed nothing of the storm that raged beneath. I felt it though, the darkness inside her calling to mine like a siren song. The crown sat on her dark hair—not actually Archer’s crown since she’d refused to wear it again after the funeral—but one forged from Levanya’s sword. A warrior’s crown for a warrior queen. My warrior queen. And his. Forevermore she was his.
Quill hadn’t left her side since that night, as if afraid she might disappear too if they were separated. Now she sat in a chair pulled close to Paesha’s, her small hand clutched in the queen’s larger one, Archer’s deck of cards still visible in her pocket. The child’s eyes were too old, too knowing for her face, haunted by what she had witnessed. By what she had lost. Another thing I couldn’t fix. Another failure to add to my growing list of shit I couldn’t control. I should have fucking been there.
Serene was the last to arrive, draped in mourning colors that somehow managed to leech the candlelight from the room. “Such tragedy,” she murmured, her voice like silk over steel. “The young king had such… potential.”
My fingers tightened on the back of Paesha’s chair until the wood creaked in protest. Serene, Goddess of Lust and Loss, would be feeding well these days, drawing power from the grief that saturated the castle, the city, the realm. My grief. Paesha’sgrief. Fucking vulture. But she was here. And she didn’t have to be.
The heavy door was about to swing closed when footsteps echoed in the corridor beyond.
