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“Rythos—”

“What did you do?” I roared, my shadows exploding out of me.

Blackness spilled from beneath my feet, crawling across the floorboards and swallowing everything in their painful touch.

A wave of dizziness threatened to pull me to my knees.

“She asked for my help,” she sobbed. “Sh-she just wants to save you.”

Something inside my chest tore.

I closed the space between us before she could blink, stopping inches from her face. “Helion thinks she is going to sacrifice herself to the throne. Is this true?”

The question escaped me even though I already knew the answer, because some desperate part of me still needed Helion to be wrong. My little drownling had always been far too willing to throw herself at death. I thought she had found a reason to live. That she understood how loved she was. But perhaps that gave her a reason to die.

“She loves you,” Cerilla whispered. “We had planned to kill her from the start to save you, Rythos, and she is willing. You could finally be free. Let her save you.”

My shadows tightened. Cerilla sucked in a breath but refused to look away from me.

I laughed, a horrible broken sound. “You think this is saving me?” I yelled in her face, and she flinched. I pressed a hand over the dead thing beating painfully beneath my ribs. “I would rather let this fucking heart rot inside my chest. I would rather feel every piece of it decay. I would rather spend whatever miserable eternity remains to me choking on my own blood than live one day in a world where she died to save me. I am dying, Cerilla. Stop trying to fix me.”

Tears streamed down my sister’s cheeks, and those wide dark eyes pleaded for me to understand.

But this was not her choice to make.

“Use your magic to sail us to the throne faster,” I demanded.

“I-I cannot, Rythos.”

I bared my canines at her, letting her see the monster I would become for love. “I do not care if you are depleted. I do not care if you are exhausted.” My voice dropped, every word sharpened by the rage clawing through my chest. “I do not care if it hurts. You will do this for me, Cerilla. You will drag every last scrap of power from your body and put it into those sails until there is nothing left.”

I tightened my shadows and she muffled a scream.

“You owe me that fucking much.”

Chapter Forty-Six

Sacrifice

Lyra

Tears bled into the ocean as though they had never existed, swallowed by water far too vast to remember something as small as my grief.

Once, I had been willing to die simply to escape my fate. I had craved the finality of the end until Rythos slowly breathed life back into me, until Helion made me feel, until Solas made me laugh when I had forgotten how, until Cerilla became something complicated and painful, until my brother reminded me that blood did not have to mean cruelty.

They had all given pieces of life back to me without ever asking for anything in return.

And now, when I finally understood how desperately I wanted to live, I understood something else too.

Love was not only choosing to stay.

Sometimes, love was sacrifice.

It was giving back every piece of yourself to the people who had once given you theirs.

My tail carried me through the dark water with purposeful thrusts, following the green shimmering of Bryony’s scales ahead.

There were hundreds of Sirens surrounding me, iridescent scales flashing with the movement under the soft light filtering through the water in streams.