Ethel Hallow Novels & Stories

“She would never have been able to pay her debt, and Rossi has had his sights on Betsy for a while. A girl like her? She’ll fetch a big price. More than Madeleine could ever pay him.” “This is good,” Ethel says and slams her suitcase shut. “Why is this good?” She smiles at me and pats my cheek. “It means I don’t have to kill you over this.” I laugh softly, but a chill runs down my spine. Ethel is an effective murderer, I’ll never even see her coming. “No. Thank God. But if you do, please don’t do me like you did Clarissa.” Ethel laughs, but her eyes are cold. I have no doubt that she’d get rid of me if she saw me as a threat to her two chicks. “I’ll get Betsy. Will we hear from you?”

Chapter 66: The Counter-Bluff The hallway felt like a pressure chamber, holding all the air hostage between the three men. Ethan stood in the doorway—solid, unmoving, blocking the entrance like a final barrier between Elias Thorne and their hidden world inside the apartment. His hand rested casually on the frame, but the ease was an illusion. Beneath the shadow of his wrist, his fingers curled tightly around the small tactical knife.

he murmured, his voice barely audible. Sasha’s heart leapt into her throat. “What do you mean?” Ethan grabbed her hand, pulling her toward the door. “The Hollow. It’s testing me. Us. It knows I’m resisting, and it won’t stop until I give in—or until it breaks me.” The door burst open before they could reach it, a gust of icy wind extinguishing the flames in the hearth. The room plunged into darkness, the only light coming from the eerie, glowing tendrils of mist that snaked into the room like living creatures.

“It needs us.” Together, they placed the disk in the gate’s center. The stone flared. Magic roared through the room like wind, howling down the corridor. Then the gate opened. What lay beyond wasn’t a chamber. It was a sanctum — a temple lost to time. Starlight glowed from the ceiling, even though no sky pierced the stone above. At its center: a dais carved with twin wolves, one silver, one obsidian, facing each other with bared teeth and interlocked tails.

Richard hadn't built a simple dungeon down here; he had constructed an execution chamber designed to slowly drain the soul of a god. "Plant the acoustic relays against the primary seal," Ethan ordered, his voice dropping into a register that was dangerously quiet, a terrifying calm before a slaughter. "If there is a guard rotation, I want to hear what they are saying. Do not attempt to breach the door. The silver will strip your skin from your bones before you can turn the handle."

"A dangerous mind. My wolf is finding it increasingly difficult to remember that you were ever meant to be a quiet handmaid." They reached the massive, locked iron gate at the back of the Royal Laboratories. The pristine, empty workstations she had toured earlier stood quiet under the dim moonlight filtering through the high ventilation shafts. Ethan stopped in front of the gate, reaching into his pocket to retrieve a heavy, intricately carved silver key.

The one place she’d never find harm. Eidolon waited before her. Silhouetted in her second-story bedroom window, Harrow stood. *** He was across the room, silhouetted against the half-light of her bedroom. His back to her, he’d yet to turn from the pane, her Harrow. The ceiling, flaking and stained, the walls, empty and pale, it all glowed a gentle white around him.

Thunder howled in the skies above. And Seraphina collapsed — unconscious again — into Darian’s arms. But her scent had changed. The roses were darker. The peonies bled fire. And her mark — just barely glowing — had appeared over her heart. A crescent moon surrounded by a crown of white thorns. The mark of the White Queen. Darian looked up as the guards burst into the hallway, drawn by the storm, panic clear on their faces. Kaelion limped back into view, blood on his temple, rage in his eyes.

Massive, translucent roses made of solid lunar-mercury erupted from the floor, pinning Serafina to the wall and encasing Julian in a crystal tomb. I stood up, shaking, as the room became a forest of lethal, beautiful glass. Zora-Aethel looked at me. The white light was receding, but her skin remained etched with those silver veins. "Zora-Aethel?" I reached out, my heart in my throat. "I’m still here, Mama," she said, but her voice was distant, echoing from a thousand miles away. "But the Wolf... the Wolf is inside the garden now. He’s quiet, but he’s hungry."

She was in the air, looking down at her kingdom of dirt like a god who had decided to start the Great Flood. "The merger is dead," Eleanor’s voice crackled, devoid of any grandmotherly warmth. "The Sterling Tower is a tomb. But the heir... the heir is still viable. Silas, retrieve the girl. Eliminate the rest." A figure stepped to the edge of the helicopter’s open door. It wasn't Silas. It was the Imposter Ethan. He looked down at us, a bandage across his throat where the real Ethan had struck him, a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He looked identical to the man slumped beside me, but his eyes were empty—a shark in a custom suit.