CHAPTER FOUR

I stood in the courtyard ankle-deep in blood that wasn’t sure whose it was anymore, wearing the night like a coronation robe.

Cassius’s body had already cooled at my feet.

The real Elara’s heart still pulsed inside my ribcage, beating beside my own.

Two souls. One womb. One crown.

And the moon above me was laughing.

I lifted my arms.

The kneeling army, vampire and wolf alike, pressed their foreheads to the stone in perfect silence.

Not out of fear.

Out of recognition.

They saw what I had become.

The thing the prophecy had always wanted.

Not a Lycan god-king.

Not a vampire queen.

Something that had never had a name until tonight.

I tasted the word on my tongue and it tasted like apocalypse.

“Rise,” I said.

They rose as one.

I turned toward the palace, barefoot, gown shredded to ribbons, hair white as bone and dripping red.

Every step left bloody footprints that smoked where they touched the ground.

The vault door waited at the end of the oldest corridor, hidden behind a tapestry of the First War.

I ripped the tapestry down with one hand.

The door behind it was black iron, carved with runes that hurt to look at directly.

I placed my palm against it.

The metal screamed.

Then swung inward on hinges that had not moved in a thousand years.

The air that rolled out was cold and sweet, like a grave full of roses.

A staircase spiraled down into absolute dark.

I descended.

Each step, the child inside me kicked harder, claws scraping bone, eager.

My broken wrist had already healed. The shadow blade had become part of my hand, living night curled around my fingers like a pet.

At the bottom, a single torch burned with black fire.

And he waited.

He was beautiful in the way a guillotine is beautiful.

Tall, broad-shouldered, hair the same silver-white hair as mine but longer, falling to his waist like moonlight made solid.

Skin pale as winter marble.

Eyes the color of fresh arterial blood.

He wore simple black robes open at the chest, and across his heart was a scar in the shape of a crescent moon.

The scar was still bleeding.

He smiled when he saw me, slow and fond and terrible.

“My granddaughter,” he said, and the words vibrated inside my skull like cathedral bells. “You’re late.”

I stopped three steps above him.

Every instinct in my body, wolf, vampire, and the new thing that was both, screamed to kneel.

I stayed standing.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He laughed, and the torch flared higher.

“I have had many names.

The First King.

The Father of Monsters.

The One Who Ate the Moon.

But you may call me what your mother did, before I killed her for her.”

He stepped forward.

The chains that had bound him lay in pieces around his feet like dead snakes.

“I am Alaric Voss, true King of the Crimson Court.

And you, little star, are the weapon I forged the day I let them steal my daughter from her cradle.”

My throat closed.

The real Elara’s memories, now mine, flooded in:

A baby swapped at birth.

A vampire princess raised as a wolfless werewolf.

A father who burned half the continent looking for her, only to realize the prophecy required her to suffer first.

He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from my face with fingers that were too cold.

“I felt it the moment you ate her heart,” he whispered. “The circle closed. The three bloodlines, wolf, vampire, and the old gods, finally braided into one perfect noose.”

His hand slid to my stomach.

The child inside me went still, listening.

“It’s almost time,” he said. “The coronation moon is full tonight. You will birth the new world at its zenith. And I will stand at your side as the first of your consorts.”

I stepped back.

The shadow blade uncoiled, ready.

“Consort?” I repeated. “I already killed one husband tonight. I’m not in the market for another.”

His smile widened, showing fangs longer than any I’d ever seen.

“Oh, sweet child. You misunderstand.

I’m not asking to be your husband.

I’m telling you I am your father…

and your bridegroom.”

The torch went out.

When it flared back to life, he was directly in front of me, hand around my throat, gentle as a lover.

“The prophecy was never about Cassius killing his mate,” he crooned. “That was the lie we fed the wolves so they would deliver you to me broken and ripe.

The real ritual requires the daughter to lie with the father under the red moon, to birth the Devouring God from incest and betrayal.”

His thumb stroked my pulse.

“You have done the hard part.

You murdered mercy.

You devoured your twin.

You drank the Lycan King’s dying power.

Now all that remains is the final sacrament.”

He leaned in until his lips brushed mine.

“Say yes, my moon.

Say yes, and we will unmake the sun.”

I felt the child inside me stretch toward him like a flower toward darkness.

For one heartbeat, I wavered.

I saw it: the world remade in our image.

No more packs.

No more courts.

Only endless night and perfect, terrible love.

Then I remembered Cassius’s last words.

I did love you. Both of you. That was always the problem.

And I laughed in Alaric’s face.

“No,” I said.

The shadow blade plunged upward under his ribs.

He looked down, surprised, almost proud.

“Interesting choice,” he murmured.

Then he backhanded me so hard I flew twenty feet and slammed into the vault wall.

Stone cracked.

I tasted my own blood and smiled.

He advanced slowly, the wound already closing.

“You think you can deny blood?” he asked. “You are carrying my continuation. Every cell in your body sings for me.”

I stood, wiping my mouth.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’ve been lied to by prettier monsters than you.”

I lifted my hand.

The heart I had eaten, Elara’s heart, beat once in my palm, still warm, still dripping.

Alaric froze.

“You absorbed her,” he said slowly. “But you didn’t digest her. Clever girl.”

I crushed the heart.

Crimson light exploded outward.

The real Elara’s soul tore free of me, no longer mist but solid, furious woman, eyes blazing.

She looked at Alaric with pure hatred.

“Hello, Father,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

He snarled and lunged for her.

But I was faster.

I drove the shadow blade through both of them, pinning father and daughter together like insects on a card.

They screamed in harmony.

I leaned in close.

“Here’s the new prophecy,” I whispered.

“I am not your weapon.

I am not your bride.

I am not your daughter.

I am the end of your story.”

I twisted the blade.

The vault began to collapse.

Chunks of stone rained down as the old wards shattered.

Alaric reached for me, face contorted.

“You can’t,” he gasped. “The child needs—”

“The child,” I said, placing a hand on my belly, “has already chosen.”

The thing inside me ripped free in a spray of blood and starlight.

Not a baby.

Never a baby.

A fully formed creature of nightmare and beauty: skin like moonlit obsidian, wings of living shadow, eyes one gold, one crimson.

My true heir.

It looked at Alaric and Elara impaled together and opened a mouth full of too many teeth.

Then it began to feed.

I walked away as the vault caved in behind me.

The last thing I heard was Alaric screaming my name, not the name he gave me, but the one I had chosen in blood and ruin.

When I reached the surface, dawn was breaking.

The coronation moon bled out across the sky and died.

My army still knelt.

I stepped over Cassius’s corpse, picked up the fallen crown of the Lycan King, and placed it on my own head.

The child, my child, now the size of a ten-year-old and growing every second, landed beside me.

It offered me its hand.

I took it.

Together we walked toward the rising sun.

Behind us, the palace burned with black fire.

Ahead, the world waited, trembling.

I smiled, slow and sweet and final.

“Let’s go introduce ourselves.”