Secret Heir (Dynasty #1)(112)

I don’t know how to open a portal. But having watched Magnus and Raph do it, some primal part of me already knows. I let that part of me take over as the air around me shifts and splits open to reveal the universe beyond.

For a moment Magnus’s warnings about Earth not being safe, enter my mind. But I brush it away. Magnus lied to me. How could I trust anything he’s ever said to me and even if it is true, I’d much rather the shadow of that unknown danger, than the very real one in this place. It isn’t just the St. Tristan Dynasty that’s toxic, this entire world is poison.

This world is a mirror of Earth, Magnus once told me. If only I’d known then just how right he was. This place may have seemed beautiful, vibrant and vivid in a way that my life on Earth never was. But it’s just as ugly.

The beauty is nothing but a deception. It draws you in with promises of hope that creep into your soul. But it’s all lies. All of it. The danger that lurks beneath that beauty is like the thorns beneath the bloom of a rose, like poison from the sweetest forbidden fruit. Now, I know how those human myths about Eden were formed. Eden itself is the forbidden fruit and I had been foolish enough to taste it.

As I stand at the entrance of the portal and take one last look back at the St. Tristan Palace, some part of me hesitates for a moment. But the palace is as still as a tomb and Raph is nowhere in sight. I don’t know why that still has the ability to slice through my chest, not when any remaining connections with Eden have already been burned away in the devastation that I’ve just emerged from.

Raph once told me that the throne was all he was raised to ever want, at all costs. I should have listened. Because in the midst of his web of lies, that was the one truth.

I step into the portal, I do just as Layla said—I get the hell out of this poisonous world and I don’t look back.