His Bride, Her Revenge

The air was smoke and thunder.

Cambria stood frozen as the spire roared to life, the golden veins within it flaring bright as suns, casting a surreal glow across their stunned faces. Around them, the cavern began to convulse, the molten rivers surged and spat like wounded beasts, and the very walls groaned with the awakening of a power long kept dormant.

Maddox clutched his side, blood seeping between his fingers. "We need to get out of here," he said, voice strained, his eyes locked on the pulsing stone. "Now."

But Knox was already moving not away, but toward the spire.

"Knox!" Cambria shouted. "Don’t!"

He didn’t stop. His jaw was tight, eyes glassy with a mix of awe and agony, like he was standing on the edge of something too vast to understand. The spire called to him not in words, but in sensation, in a pull at the very marrow of his bones.

"Do you feel it?" he said hoarsely, glancing back at her. "It’s not just power. It’s judgment."

Cambria’s heart pounded in her chest. She reached him in three strides, seizing his arm. "That’s not judgment, it’s corruption. It’s what destroyed Seraphine. What drove Lucien mad?"

Knox looked at her then really looked. And for the first time in what felt like years, she saw the brother she once knew, not the weapon war had tried to make of him.

"I’m not like them," he whispered.

But the flame didn’t care about intentions. It never had.