SERAPHINA’S POV
I had expected Catherine to be calculating.
I had expected her to be cruel.
What I had not expected was how calm she looked after it was done, as though everything that had just happened inside this ruined battlefield—the puppet, the suffering, the collapsing remnants of her own carefully constructed chaos—had rely been a minor inconvenience she had already finished sorting through.
She stood still in her barrier like a queen surveying a battlefield she had already won.
The air around her still trembled faintly with residual corruption, dark threads of stolen power curling and retracting into her like obedient snakes returning to a master’s hand.
I could feel it even from where I stood, still in Alina’s form, my senses stretched thin and razor-sharp with fury.
Catherine had not only survived the chaos of her own creation, but she had also absorbed it, digested it, and made it part of herself.
Her gaze landed on with slow amusent.
“Well then,” she said lightly, as though she were comnting on damaged rchandise rather than a living being who had bled, fought, and endured everything she had thrown at it.
Her lips curved slightly, not quite a smile—more like a scientist examining laboratory results. “That was...unfortunate.”
The casualness of her voice made my jaw clench, and my breath catch. I felt a hot wave of disbelief roil through , sharp enough that it nearly stole my next thought.
Unfortunate?
That creature had suffered unimaginable tornt for who knew how long. A soul had been trapped inside a living nightmare.
And all Catherine could call it was unfortunate.
She shrugged. “Oh well, I suppose that’s what you get from a prototype that should have been discarded long ago.”
My claws dug into the ruined earth before I even realized I had moved.
Alina’s body responded before my mind could fully restrain it, muscles coiling tight beneath fur that bristled with restrained violence.
Catherine tilted her head, studying with that sa clinical interest she might have given a tricky experint.
“You know,” she continued, her voice softening as if she were confiding sothing intimate, “I used to think there was potential in you. In all of you. That was my mistake. I allowed sentint to interfere with efficiency.”
Her eyes flickered briefly toward the devastation around us, toward the remnants of puppets that had once been people, toward the lingering traces of her own handiwork.
Towards my mother’s still body.
“If you and Margaret had simply cooperated back then,” she said wistfully, “none of this would have been necessary. I would not have been forced to maintain...defective outcos.”
Sothing inside my chest snapped so sharply it felt like bone breaking.
Mother’s face flashed in my mind—not as she was now, trapped and suffering under Catherine’s control, but as she had been in the fragile monts of our dream connection.
Her voice, steady even through exhaustion, telling to anchor inward first. To rember who I was before I reached outward.
I had tried.
I had tried so hard.
My mother was gone.
My father’s mory had been desecrated.
My mate was sowhere above us, probably still fighting for his and my life.
But Catherine was standing in front of now, breathing, speaking, twisting every wound she had ever carved till it festered and rotted.
My fury boiled over, impossible to restrain, an unstoppable flood that drowned every other feeling.
I launched myself forward.
The ground beneath Alina’s paws shattered as I moved, the force of the acceleration sending debris scattering behind .
My vision narrowed to a single point: Catherine.
Every instinct, every thread of power inside surged in unison, responding to a rage no longer controlled, no longer guided, but pure and overwhelming.
I struck.
Or I tried to.
The barrier around Catherine dissolved, and she moved.
She did not rush. She did not strain.
She simply shifted her weight slightly to the side, as though stepping out of the way of falling rain, and my attack tore through empty air where she had been only an instant before.
My claws carved through stone instead, sending a spray of fractured earth into the air.
A low, quiet sound left her, almost a sigh.
“You’re still relying on impulse,” she said, circling with unhurried steps. “Still letting your emotions dictate your timing. It’s almost boring, watching you repeat the sa predictable pattern.”
I twisted, trying to track her movent, but she was already behind .
A pulse of energy flared at my back.
I barely managed to throw myself forward before it struck, the impact grazing rather than piercing through fully.
Pain detonated through my side, white-hot and blinding, forcing a soundless gasp from as I skidded across the broken ground.
I caught myself, claws digging deep to stop my montum, chest heaving with a mix of pain and frustration. My breath ca out ragged, pulling in the acrid scent of shattered earth.
Catherine hadn’t even changed her expression. She actually looked bored.
“You see?” she continued conversationally, as though we were discussing strategy over tea rather than fighting in the aftermath of slaughter.
“This is why I called you defective. You’re never going to evolve properly. Too much emotional noise. Too much attachnt. It weakens judgnt.”
My breathing grew ragged and desperate, each inhale suffused with rage and frustration.
Alina’s body trembled beneath , not from fear, but from rage that had nowhere to go but forward.
A voice flickered through my mory then, sharp and commanding. ‘Don’t let her dictate the rhythm. Push through it.’
But Catherine was already inside the rhythm. She was shaping it.
Another strike ca from my left, faster than the last.
I blocked it instinctively, but the force behind it cracked through my guard and sent a shockwave up my arm. My vision blurred for a fraction of a second.
“There it is,” Catherine said softly, smiling. “That mont of instability. That is always where you break.”
I snarled and launched again, faster this ti, forcing every ounce of power I had into raw aggression.
The ground fractured beneath as I moved, Alina’s form becoming nothing more than a blur of motion and fury. I refused to think. Refused to hesitate. I would reach her. I would end this.
But Catherine was never where I aid.
Every strike t nothing but remnants of her presence, echoes of movent that had already passed. It was like fighting smoke that learned how to speak.
“You’re angry,” she observed, almost gently. “Good. That ans you still care enough to be manipulated.”
My claws tore through another illusion of her position, and this ti the backlash hit harder.
A wave of force slamd into my chest, knocking back several steps. I felt sothing inside strain under the pressure, like a thread pulled too tight.
Catherine walked closer now, finally reducing the distance between us just enough for to see her clearly again.
Her eyes were studying the way a scientist studies a failing subject right before disposal.
“I kept you alive longer than I should have,” she said. “A curiosity. A variable. But you never stabilized. Never aligned. Even now, you resist what you are ant to beco.”
“I am not your experint,” I spat, my voice layered with Alina’s growl beneath it.
Catherine’s expression softened slightly, almost pitying.
“No,” she agreed. “You’re not. That is precisely the problem.”
Sothing in her tone changed then. "If you were, you would be perfect."
I felt the shift in intent. My instincts scread before my mind could process it.
I moved.
But it was already too late.
Catherine raised her hand, and the air around her condensed, collapsing inward like space itself had been folded into a single point.
I saw threads of dark, refined energy like the chaotic corruption she had been using before. And they were rushing toward .
My body reacted, but the world reacted faster.
The mont it struck, there was no explosion. No outward violence.
Only absolute, suffocating silence.
The ground beneath my paws vanished as though reality itself had been erased.
My senses fractured instantly. The battlefield, Catherine, even the awareness of my own body began to dissolve at the edges, slipping away like ink washed in water.
For a fraction of a second, I saw Catherine smiling knowingly as if confirming sothing she had prepared long before I ever stepped onto this island.
Then the world folded.
And I fell.
There was no sensation of impact, no sense of direction, no up or down.
I reached instinctively for sothing—anything. Alina’s instincts, Kieran’s voice, Margaret’s guidance, my own identity—but even those anchors slipped away as the void widened beneath .
The last thing I felt before everything dissolved completely was the echo of Catherine’s words, distant now, like they had been spoken from another reality entirely.
’A defective outco.’
And then there was nothing at all.
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