She wasn’t broken. After three days in a hole, after whatever Vask had done to her, she wasfurious.
His mate. His impossible, defiant, human mate.
Sylas felt something inside him slip its leash.
“Witnesses, myKing.” Vask’s voice was calm. Measured. The voice of a male who believed he held all the leverage. “The council representatives I invited to observe your...priorities. They’ve seen enough now, I think. The Alpha King who abandoned a Fallen breach to chase after his human pet. The leader who let his realm burn for a female who isn’t even proper prey.”
Movement in the shadows. Sylas didn’t need to look to know who was watching. Faction leaders. Council proxies. The political parasites who had been circling his throne since the moment he’d brought Elsa back to the fortress.
Vask had staged this perfectly. The chaos above, the choice below, and witnesses to document every damning second of the Alpha King proving himself compromised.
Sylas didn’t look at the shadows where the witnesses hid. Didn’t care about the political calculation Vask was laying out like moves on a game board.
He looked at Elsa.
She was pushing herself up. Blood dripping down her chin. Eyes fixed on him with an intensity that had nothing to do with rescue and everything to do with the bond singing between them—finally,finallyrestored, finally telling him what he’d been desperate to know for three endless days.
She was alive. She was fighting. She washis.
“You struck my mate.” Sylas’s voice came out wrong. Too low. Too calm. The kind of calm that came before earthquakes, before avalanches, before the world ended.
Vask’s composure flickered. “She’s not your mate. She’s an aberration. Lux’s gift, corrupted by a king who forgot what purity—”
“You struck. My mate.”
Sylas moved.
The staff came up—Vask was trained, had been trained by the same masters who’d trained Sylas’s father—but training meant nothing against a bonded Alpha whose mate’s blood was still wet on the floor.
Sylas caught the staff in one hand. Crushed it. Let the splinters fall.
His other hand closed around Vask’s throat.
“The witnesses you invited,” Sylas said, lifting the priest off his feet with no more effort than he’d use to lift a pup. “Let them see this too. Let them see what happens to anyone who touches what’s mine.”
Fear bloomed in Vask’s eyes. Real fear—not performance, not political theater. The raw kind that no amount of training could fake.
“Kill me,” Vask choked, “and the council will have grounds. You’ll prove everything they’ve whispered. The feral king. The compromised—”
“You think death is the worst I can do?” Sylas leaned closer, letting Vask see exactly what lived behind his eyes. The predator that had been caged by politics and protocol and the endless performance of civilized kingship. “I’ve been Alpha for fifteen years. I know exactly how to destroy a male without ever spilling his blood.”
“My King.” Keth’s voice cut through the red haze. “We have the females. The alarms are spreading—Dren reports the breach threat was staged, but the riot in the pits is real. We need to move.”
Sylas held Vask’s gaze. Watched the priest’s face darken as his airway compressed. Felt the bond pulse with Elsa’s pain, her exhaustion, her desperate need to get out of this hole and into air that didn’t taste like fear.
Sylas’s claws tightened.
“Kill me,” Vask rasped, “and the council will have grounds—”
“You touched my mate.” Sylas’s voice was almost gentle. “Did you think there was any other way this ended?”
His claws punched through cartilage and muscle. Vask’s eyes went wide—not with fear, but something slower. The hollow look of a male who had run out of moves and only just realized it.
The priest’s body went slack. Sylas let the corpse fall.
“Tell the council,” Sylas said to the shadows, “that this is what happens to anyone who touches what’s mine.”
He crossed to Elsa in three strides. She was on her feet now—barely, swaying, one hand braced against the wall—but standing. Mia and Ari huddled behind her, and Sylas noted with something like grim approval that Elsa had positioned herself between the other women and the threat, even bleeding, even half-broken.