Page 103 of Labyrinthine
“Then you should’ve started by fightingwithme.”
His breath catches. I don’t look back.
Later, when I ask to go to the gardens, he tells me no. When I ask for the library, he refuses again, gentler this time. Every denial is another stone laid in the wall between us. His protection feels like a prison now. His silence a kind of cruelty.
When I stand by the window and stare down at Threnos, he places a hand between my shoulders.
“I love you more than I thought possible,” he murmurs.
I don’t answer.
He kisses the crown of my head like a benediction. “Even if you hate me, even if you never forgive me, I will protect you. I will never stop.”
And then he’s gone.
The guards he commands keep watch.
The city is golden in the morning sun. The spires of Starsfall’s capital shimmer like they’re made of glass. Threnos looks peaceful. Beautiful. But I know what it’s built on and what lives beneath the stone.
When he returns in the evening and asks if I want to bathe, I nod without speaking.
He escorts me to the royal baths and stands like a sentinel as I walk the room’s perimeter, checking for hidden threats I can’t see. His eyes plead with me to let him stay.
I say nothing.
He leaves.
I undress slowly, peeling away layers like old skin. I sink into the water, hot and laced with crushed herbs. The heat burns, but it’s a welcome pain. It reminds me that I’m still here. Still thinking. Still doubting.
The steam curls around me like mist, and I let it carry my thoughts toward the high, domed ceiling.
Darian’s words repeat like a curse. Mallen wants to use you. Mallen wants to rule. Mallen will betray your father, or work with him, or become something worse.
But Darian isn’t innocent either. I remember the way he said my name—like it was both a question and a promise. The memory stings more than it should.
And I’m just a girl caught in a war of shadows, with no way to tell who’s telling the truth, and no time left to find out.
I sink lower into the water.
If this is what power feels like—this constant doubt, this gnawing dread—then maybe I was never meant to have it.
But I’ll still fight for the right to choose.
Even if it means choosing to walk away from both of them.
Even if it means standing alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There areno celebrations for the final trial. Starsfall holds its breath. The crowd is somber—tense, reverent, as though the ground itself has decided to mourn. No one has ever reached the third trial. The Reaping has never allowed it.
The steps form an amphitheater that descends in solemn rings, each tier etched into the bones of the earth, as if the land itself bears witness to every trial it consumes. Moss crawls between the stones, dark and thick as old blood, and at the lowest point, the iron gates yawn open like the jaws of some slumbering god.
And above it all looms the statue—twice my height, cloaked and faceless, one hand raised in warning, the other gripping a curved blade forever rusted by the offerings of the dead. She is the Reaping made stone, and she watches us all.
The tributes step forward beneath that eerie silence, and awe stirs like smoke through the gathered watchers. Their attentionfinds Darian first. He bows, grinning, drinking in their stunned devotion. He’s turned their opinions inside out. Rewritten everything they believed. In a few short weeks, he’s changed the kingdom. Changed me.
The Larksbind men are like carved obsidian—still, dark, unreadable. Every motion is purposeful. Assured. As if survival isn’t a hope, but a fact already written.
