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It was to ravage from the inside out.

“Did you think,” Erik asked, with a chilling softness, “that after all the work I have done, I would let it slip away?” I panted, unable to rip my eyes from the blade’s edge as he lifted it to the light. “Another lesson you must learn, my love, is that preventing the inevitable will only prolong the suffering.”

Slowly, he stepped closer.

My gaze tore toward his face, and my heartbeat became a wild thump in my limbs. Because although the blade was in his grip, there was no triumph in his expression. There was only an icy, unyielding fury.

And I knew what he was about to do.

“No.” The word was a whisper of air against my lips, a voiceless nightmare scream.

He closed the distance between us, and I began thrashing in panic.

Erik’s specter twined around my body from my shins to my waist, keeping me still. His power pressed against my wounded abdomen, and though I gasped, I felt too far from my body to truly feel the pain. I was wild, animalistic, shredding my dignity with my own claws without caring that he was watching.

Because this was a cruelty worse than any other. A fate that could not be undone.

He laid the cold blade across my collarbone, forcing me to freeze. My breaths streamed against the dayglass as his merciless eyes pierced me, his patchwork power thrumming like a gorging serpent around my body.

“Don’t,” I sobbed, trembling fiercely, imagining my specter unraveling from my skin, thread by thread. Imagining the all-consuming emptiness and knowing, with everything inside me, that I would rather he ran me through with the blade instead. “I’ll give you what you want,” I said, desperate. “Anything.”

In this moment, I meant it. By all the gracious gods, I meant it.

Erik’s specter tightened around me, like the final pinning of a creature’s neck before cutting off its head.

Then he pushed the blade against my skin.

I felt a hot, sharp scratch, and squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the shimmer of my specter as it hemorrhaged out. Not wanting this image burned into my mind.

For several heart-racing seconds, the anticipation was a beast towering above me, its jaws ready to snap.

But no severing sensation followed that first drawing of blood. There was only the constant, ever-discomforting pull of the compass.

No different from the pull I’d experienced before.

I opened my eyes blearily, chest heaving against the blade. And I startled. Because Erik’s rage was nothing short of incandescent.

“You’ll give me anything?” he asked, his voice a low growl. “Then give me an answer. Tell me what you did.”

I held his stare, confused, shaking, terrified by the wrath in his eyes.

Then his meaning sank in. The shouting I’d heard earlier, the cool anger that had replaced his air of triumph. This was the reason.

Erik had known that this cut would not strip my specter; he’d only meant to scare me out of my senses. Because, even now, with both the compass and sword in his hands . . . he could not get either to work.

And he believed it was because of me.

He snapped the lid on the compass, and relief turned me liquid—a mess of frayed nerves and sweat. My breathing was frantic, climbing up into hysterical laughter, so I didn’t realize that his eyes were narrowing—that his rage was spilling over—until the sword whooshed away from my face and crashed into the wall behind him.

“Tell me!” he roared.

My frenzied breaths broke off with a choking sound. There was a crack in the stones from where he’d thrown the sword.

And Erik . . . Erik shook as though a beast was trying to rip out of his skin. His chest heaved wildly. Veins protruded in his neck. Even the tendrils of his specter turned as thin and hard as wire around me, a form of Wielding I’d never experienced. It was vindictive, digging into my skin.

My own specter shriveled. Every instinct screamed at me to drop my gaze.

But I gritted my teeth against the fear and held his stare. I didn’t care if his specter marked me with a webwork of bruises. I didn’t care if he left me up here to rot.