EVELYN’S POV
“If you cooperate with , I’ll help you.”
The words left my mouth before I had ti to asure them.
For one strange, suspended mont, the hollow seed to hold its breath around us.
Jack’s ruined body strained against Lucian’s bindings, the dying forest crackled softly under the weight of the corruption leaking from him, and Lucian Reed stared at as though I had just offered him a blade and asked him to place it against my throat.
Maybe I had.
I barely knew him.
I knew his na, his reputation, the fragnts Catherine allowed to circulate through her laboratories, and the wary respect even her most loyal people carried when they spoke of him.
I knew he was dangerous. I knew he had helped Catherine more than once. I knew that, just like , he had stood close enough to darkness that it had left stains in him no amount of regret could fully wash away.
And yet, when I looked at him, sothing in paused.
Maybe it was the sadness in his eyes, the kind that did not ask to be pitied because it believed it deserved every wound it carried.
Maybe it was the way he had lifted that blade against Jack while knowing it would kill him, too. He had not acted out of cruelty, but out of a terrible, exhausted certainty that one life could prevent sothing worse.
Or maybe it was sothing older and stranger, so instinct beneath witchcraft and blood that I did not have the ti or will to examine.
Whatever it was, it did not matter.
I could not afford to dwell on Lucian Reed.
Jack’s body jerked violently against the bindings, and a wet snarl tore from his throat as black veins pulsed beneath his torn fur.
The corruption inside him was still alive, still searching, still waiting for a command from the woman who had always known how to break things to her benefit.
I stepped back from the circle. “Are you going to cooperate or not?”
Lucian’s gaze sharpened, all that startled emotion folding behind caution. “That depends on what your version of cooperation ans.”
“It ans you stop trying to martyr yourself long enough to be useful.”
His mouth tightened, and for the briefest second, I thought he might argue.
Jack convulsed in his restraints again, claws digging into the earth until dirt and blood sprayed across the glowing seal.
Lucian looked at him, and his expression hardened.
“What do you need from ?”
Hope should not have moved through as strongly as it did.
I ignored it.
“First, you need to understand that Catherine will already know sothing went wrong,” I said. “Jack’s corruption is tethered. If his condition destabilizes too sharply, she will feel it.”
“She’ll send people.”
“She already has.”
Lucian stilled.
I turned my head slightly, listening past Jack’s ragged breathing, past the brittle shiver of dead leaves, past the faint hum of Lucian’s binding spell.
There it was. Movent threading through the trees, too disciplined to belong to frightened civilians and too quiet to be ordinary trackers.
Catherine’s retrieval unit.
Marcus’ n—or what remained of them after the tribunal had exposed him to the world—were probably with them.
Either way, they were coming for Jack, and if they found Lucian here with unhard and Jack bound beneath a spell shaped from his hand, everything would collapse before it began.
“Follow my lead,” I said.
Lucian frowned. “What—”
I bent and snatched a jagged strip of bark from the base of a dead sycamore. Before I could give myself ti to flinch, I dragged the sharp edge across my forearm.
Pain split hot and bright through my skin, and blood welled instantly, sliding down toward my wrist in a vivid line.
Lucian cursed under his breath and reached for , then stopped himself before his fingers touched my arm.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
“Giving them a story.”
“Does your mouth hurt?”
I bit back an inappropriate bark of laughter.
“My stories work better with evidence.”
Lucian’s gaze flicked to the cut, and tension flashed across his face: a mix of concern, anger, or maybe both.
I clenched my jaw against the sting and sared so of the blood along the sleeve of my dress.
“Jack attacked ,” I said quickly. “You stopped him from killing , but I was wounded in the process. That’s why he’s bound.”
Lucian’s gaze searched mine. “And Catherine will believe that?”
“She has no reason not to.”
“Is this necessary?” Lucian said, skeptical.
I nodded. “She has already felt that he was spelled. Do you want to tell her what you planned to do?”
A muscle in his jaw ticked as his eyes darted to my arm again. “This is crazy.”
“Well,” I said, looking toward the trees as the footsteps drew closer, “it’s the best we have.”
***
Catherine burst into my room on the island less than an hour after we returned.
The door struck the wall hard enough to make the glass ornants on my vanity tremble.
Two attendants hovered beside , pale and silent, but Catherine did not spare them a glance. Her attention went straight to my arm.
“What happened?”
The question sounded like worry.
It was not.
Her eyes moved over the bandage the facility dic had wrapped around my forearm—not like a mother checking her injured daughter, but like a rchant appraising damaged silk, weighing if the flaw lowered its value.
Sothing cold and bitter curled in my stomach.
“Jack happened,” I said.
Catherine’s expression sharpened. “Jack?”
“Your precious little monster tried to kill .” I let anger rise. “He would have succeeded if Lucian hadn’t stopped him.”
Her gaze flicked over my face, reading, weighing, slicing.
“And you were injured.”
“Obviously.”
One of the attendants sucked in a soft breath at my tone. Catherine rely stepped closer.
“You should not have engaged him directly.”
I laughed once, short and humorless. “That is what you’re upset about? I shouldn’t have touched your little science experint?”
Her eyes cooled. “Evelyn.”
“No, don’t ’Evelyn’ .” I stood from the edge of the bed, the movent pulling painfully at the cut under the bandage. “You released Jack into that square like a weapon and expected what, exactly? That he would return neatly packaged? That his darkness would obey forever because you’re in control?”
Catherine’s face went still.
That stillness had frightened when I was younger. It warned to be careful.
Now it only made angrier.
“You did this to him,” I said. “You and Marcus. You tore him apart, filled him with sothing neither of you fully controlled, and now he can barely recognize anything around him, let alone himself.”
“He was never ant to be delicate.”
“He was not ant to be ruined either!”
For a second, the room fell silent enough for to hear the distant pulse of machinery beneath the island.
Sowhere below us, the core chamber breathed with its glass walls, sacred circles, preserved wolves, and all the dead things Catherine loved to play with.
Catherine looked past as if she were staring at sothing a great distance away.
“Where is he?”
“Restrained.”
She moved before I could say anything else.
I followed her out of the room, through the silent corridors, and into the elevator that descended deep beneath the island, carrying us past layers of steel and security until we reached the laboratory levels and finally stepped into the reinforced chamber where Jack lay restrained beneath layers of tal, witchcraft, and sedatives.
Even unconscious and back in human form, he looked monstrous. His body twitched against the restraints, black veins crawling beneath his skin in frantic patterns as if sothing inside him wanted to claw its way out.
For the first ti since I had known her, Catherine hesitated.
“You want to know the full details of what we do here?” she said, her voice velvety soft. “You want a front row seat to the ’science experints’? Then watch carefully, Evelyn.”
Then she placed both hands above Jack’s chest.
Power poured out of her.
The room darkened at the edges as her witchcraft sank into him, not gentle, not soothing, but absolute. Commanding.
Forcing the corruption to stop thrashing, forcing the darkness to fold inward, forcing Jack’s ruined body to accept stillness.
Jack arched beneath her hands, a broken growl tearing from him, and I had to grip the edge of the observation table to keep from stepping forward.
Catherine’s face paled. The veins at her temples darkened faintly. Sweat gathered along her hairline, and the air grew heavy with the tallic scent of spent power.
She pushed harder, her jaw clenched, until the black movent beneath Jack’s skin finally slowed.
The restraints stopped rattling.
Jack’s breathing steadied into sothing ugly but survivable.
Catherine withdrew her hands and swayed.
I caught the movent before she could hide it.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and I hated that the question ca out softer than I intended.
I hated that so part of still saw Catherine as the woman who raised —the closest I had to a mother—instead of the monster she’d beco over the years.
She turned her head toward .
For one fractured second, she looked tired. Not invincible or untouchable. Just a woman who had spent too much power controlling a monster she had created.
Then the mont passed.
“I’m fine,” she said.
She was lying.
We both knew it.
Her eyes returned to Jack, but her focus had gone sowhere beyond the room, beyond the island, beyond even the war she had already set in motion. Sothing inside her had reached a decision.
When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and cold enough to chill .
“I’m done waiting.”
My fingers tightened around the table edge.
Catherine looked at the abomination her son had beco, and a faint, terrible calm settled over her face.
“I know what I have to do.”
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