Chapter 62: Sixty Two
The water is rising faster now--no, boiling upward--and every push of my body against the stone door feels like lifting a mountain. My shoulders scream, muscles splitting, blood slipping down my forearms as I strain to hold it open.
"Go!" I roar, choking on the bitter water already lapping at my throat. "Go!"
Evadne is first, crown clutched to her chest as the chamber groans around us. Soraya follows, then Fawn, and Altheira--but the water is up to my chin now, and I can’t breathe.
"Lyra--"
"Don’t look back!" I push harder. The door shudders. It’s closing. I’m closing.
Then something moves beneath the surface--a hand, skeletal and cold, wrapping around my ankle. Another. A dozen more. I know it is an illusion, the powerful wards around this place bringing horrors to life, trying to pull me under as it has been for the lot of us in the last four hours, but it doesn’t make the danger any less imminent.
I thrash, kick, scream, the water swallowing every sound. The door is slipping from my fingers.
Someone grabs my wrist--Evadne--screaming my name as the chamber collapses behind us. And in the final heartbeat, as the flood crashes through and the dead reach for me, I let go.
The tomb roars shut as we explode into the freezing night air, coughing, gasping. Alive.
We all crawl on knees and hands, shivering and wheezing, staring between each other, the crown abandoned in our center now. It is a surprise we all haven’t frozen to death, considering how long we stood in the chamber, trying to figure out how the tomb worked or how to steal it without triggering the death traps scattered all over the place.
The Draemont Queen’s crown is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Even with the cold sharp as knives in my lungs, my legs and arms quivering from holding the door for hours, the crushing ache in my skull and the sickness roiling in my stomach, I can’t tear my eyes from it.
Forged from what looks like living ice, it shimmers in the gloom with an ethereal light, every jagged edge singing of power older than empires. At its heart burns a single blood-red diamond, pulsing faintly, like a heartbeat, like a dark hymn thrumming against my skull, whispering to be worn. To be claimed. To be obeyed.
It had been a sight to see, all six of us screaming at each other, until we realized some roles had already been decided for us.
Like mine. And Evadne’s.
Why?
Because Lucien is a bastard.
The sigil of House Ironfang was carved into the doors. Somehow, he’d interfered with the Selection again. Only I could hold them open. And only Evadne could retrieve the crown, because only someone with Draemont blood could unlock the chest.
And Evadne, as Lucien’s cousin, had just enough of it in her veins.
Learning I was stuck in the background of the final conquest didn’t feel like the relief I expected. The supposed "immunity" only made me angrier. By fixing me to a single task, holding the door, I couldn’t tell if Lucien was trying to protect me... or send me a message. That he’d changed his mind. That he didn’t want me as his queen after all.
He’d chosen Evadne for the glory. Maybe he wanted her.
Or maybe he just didn’t want me here at all.
Why had I even bothered coming? He’d already written my fate with one move. And it left me wondering what’s next--the cauldron of oil? Exile? At this point, I’d take exile over being ignored, over being treated like I’m nothing.
Funny how a month ago I’d have given anything not to be seen by him.
As the chill fades and the last of the water sluices out of the cavern, spilling in silver streams over the cliff’s edge, the bells begin tolling. Once. Twice. Then again and again, a heavy iron heartbeat counting down the final hour.
One hour until midnight.
One hour until one of us is crowned.
The air shifts subtly at first, but impossible to ignore. Lilith’s green gaze sharpens to a predator’s gleam. Soraya’s hand drifts toward her weapon. Fawn’s lips are blue and trembling, her soaked body on the verge of collapse. Altheira just looks... done, her curls plastered flat against her skull, her eyes hollow.
And Evadne--other than her eyes a bloodshot red from swimming down for several minutes to get the crown of the chest, she seems just fine.
The world seems to draw in a deep breath in that moment. And then, it all goes to hell.
Lilith moves first, a blur of motion that splashes through the ankle-deep water. Her hand closes around the crown’s icy edge before Evadne even registers it, wrenching it free with a snarl. Soraya lunges next, colliding with her shoulder first, and the two go down hard, crashing against the wet stone in a mess of kicking limbs and curses.
"Mine!" Lilith hisses.
"You wish," Soraya spits, kneeing her in the ribs.
The crown slips. Altheira snatches it mid-fall, only for Fawn, half-delirious, to claw at her from behind. The sudden weight drags them both sideways. The crown tumbles again. Evadne dives, fingers brushing metal, but Soraya’s whip of shadow slams into her arm, knocking it wide.
Safe to say all alliances have come to an abrupt end.
And then they’re out of the cavern, spilling back onto the cave’s mouth in a tangle of bodies, violence and blood. And then, onto the devilish bridge.
The wind howls. Wood groans beneath frantic boots. The crown changes hands again--Soraya to Fawn, Fawn to Lilith, Lilith to Evadne--each transfer met with a roar from the crowd above. Names are shouted. Bets screamed. The commentary turns frenzied, a rapid-fire chant of accusations and declarations as blood spatters the broken planks and someone’s teeth hit the floor with a wet crack.
"Lilith’s got it--no, Soraya--"
"She bit her! She actually bit her!"
"Gods above, look at them--"
The bridge is hell.
It thrashes beneath us like a living thing, every plank trembling under the weight of a viciousness to outlast any war. One wrong shove, and the whole thing will give way.
And in the center of it is Lilith.
She isn’t just fighting. She’s trying to butcher them, a mad, liberating grin on her lips. All afternoon, she had limped on her broken foot and barely spoken a word to either of us. Now I see that all she’s been doing was conserving her strength.
"Stormrend has never sat the throne," she snarls, driving her boot into Fawn’s ribs. The woman screams and flies backwards, catching the edge of the bridge by a single trembling hand. "You may have the power of the skies, but it doesn’t make you any less weak."
"Lilith stop--" I start to yell as she raises her hands in that familiar style that spells death, but before anyone can reach her, a whip of flame scorches across the boards, forcing us all back, and Fawn tumbles away into the fog with a terrified wail.
We don’t even get a heartbeat to mourn her before the world begins to come apart.
It starts with a low groan--wood splintering, ropes straining--and then the bridge bucks beneath us like a living thing. Planks rip free. Gaps split open under our feet.
Evadne’s blue eyes snap to mine, wide and wild.
Run.
She bolts forward, a blur of motion as the bridge tilts sharply under our weight. Wind howls through the gaps as more boards shear away and vanish into the abyss below. I’m sprinting before I even think, boots slipping on the soaked wood. Behind us, the supports tear free one by one--CRACK. SNAP. SCREEE--a sound like the world ending.
Oh gods. Oh gods.
Lilith’s roar cuts through the chaos as Evadne snatches the crown straight from her hands. The woman lunges, flames blooming from her fingertips, but the ground vanishes beneath her and she stumbles, cursing, barely catching herself on a hanging rope as the bridge collapses around us.
We barely make it to the other side before the bridge gives a final tortured shriek and tears free from its moorings, vanishing into the void below with a roar of wind and splintered wood.
And just as I rise to my feet, Evadne unleashes a gut wrenching shriek as Altheira leaps onto her back and sinks her fangs into her neck. Her eyes are aglow with fury as she merely reaches behind her, grabs a fistful of Altheira’s hair before the woman can tear out her neck and hurls her so hard against the black gates, I hear her bones shatter.
Evadne’s gaze snaps to me as she wheezes, blood pouring from her torn throat down her leather. "Take--"
But the rest of her sentence never comes.
Her body jerks once, twice, and then my gaze drops to the blade sliding through her chest from behind, so close to her heart I swear I can hear the beat falter.
Lilith leans close, breath against Evadne’s ear. "I’ve right about had enough of your nonsense."
The crown slips from Evadne’s trembling fingers and rolls until it stops at my feet. My breath hitches as she chokes on a mouthful of blood, as Lilith twists the blade and drags it free with obscene slowness, eyes locked on mine the entire time. She wants me to watch.
To my left, Soraya lies sprawled in a dark pool, unmoving.
In front of me, Evadne sways, blood bubbling from her lips. She blinks down at the wound with a dazed kind of confusion, pressing shaking hands against it, as if that could repair the torn tendon.
"A--Ash..." she breathes, and it sounds like she’s reaching for me. Like she’s begging.
And then Lilith raises the sword again, without hesitation. Without mercy. Just the intent to end her, not because it’s necessary, but because she can.
Something breaks in me. Something deep and furious and done.