“You won’t kill her.”
It’s a fucking promise.
Midas knows it, too. He can see it in my face.
His jaw tightens, a different kind of resolve settling there. “If I can’t have her, no one can.”
Unease rushes through my veins, diluting my festering ire. I glance from him to her, my body tense, fists clenched at my sides. All I want to do is let my magic lash out, to bleed up through his legs and corrode him from cock to crown.
But I can’t.
I fucking can’t.
Because I can see in the crazed resolve in his eyes that the threat he’s laid out isn’t a ploy. If he feels even a hint of it, if my magic doesn’t react fast enough to kill him first, he will open her throat and I will watch her die right in front of me.
Midas will never let her go, and I will never risk her. He can see the truth of that in every second of my hesitation. The line of blood shimmering on her neck is the only blood I’ll allow to be spilled.
“Go now, Ravinger. You have thirty seconds, or I will kill her.”
I can feel my Wrath look at me, waiting for an order one way or another, but I’m stuck in this dilemma.
“Use your ribbons,” I urge her. They’re strong. She’s strong. She only needs to trust herself and—
A lamenting sob pours out of her mouth, eyes filling as she looks at me with something like regret. “I can’t.”
I frown, not understanding the look on her face, but Midas’s laugh heckles me.
“Oh, she didn’t tell you?” he asks smugly, mouth curved up. “She lost that privilege.”
My body goes still. Even the roots clawing at my neck seem to pause.
Midas motions down to her hand, and for the first time in all of this madness, I realize what’s tied around her wrist.
A single gold ribbon. One I know very well. One I expect to lift up and move.
Except...it doesn’t. It’s not trying to weave closer to me or shove Midas away in a protective furor. It just hangs there limply, and I know instantly that something is wrong. It’s in the lackluster color, the drooping ends. Even at rest, Auren’s ribbons are always...alive. As vibrant as she is.
And that’s when I see the severed end, the curdled drips of blood left behind.
No. No.
Something roars in my ears, and my eyes flash up to her misery-laced face, as the realization of what he’s taken from her sinks into me like a boulder. “Auren...” I rasp, my voice sounding as gutted as I feel.
As tears drip down her cheeks, my heart feels like it breaks in half.
“She’s helpless and completely at my mercy, and she will die at my hand if you force it,” Midas says, but I barely even hear it. “Ten seconds, Ravinger.”
Wretched, furious grief knocks the breath from my lungs at the reality that I’ve failed her so thoroughly. I fucking can’t leave her...but I can’t risk Midas killing her either.
But then...something changes in Auren’s eyes.
If I weren’t so attuned to her, I might’ve missed it—the flicker of light that crackles in her golden irises. I definitely wouldn’t have missed the flare of her aura, though. It pulses so brightly for a moment that it stings my eyes.
That’s all the warning I get before the entire room seems to erupt with power all at once.
Everywhere around me, the gold that Auren has created seems to come to life. All I have time to do is suck in a breath as the floor, the walls, the fucking table, every inch of metal, melts like magma. It starts to attack like it’s taken on a mind of its own, like it heard the call of its mistress, and it’s come to do her bidding.
Where there was stillness before, there’s now a rupture of movement all throughout the ballroom.