These Hollow Vows (These Hollow Vows, #1)(110)

He goes on. “You think you can trick me, but your unskilled magic is no match for my power. Your mortality and empathy make you weak. Bond with me, and she will be spared. Refuse me and watch countless others just like her lose their lives because of you.”

More blood trickles across the blade.

“Release her,” I say, my voice broken. I’m floundering. The throne room is lined with Mordeus’s sentries, all looking ready to tear me apart at the first order. If this worked, maybe Jas is safe now, but I might be the reason that this innocent girl dies. “Please.”

“You’ll take the bond?”

I can’t die without knowing Jas is okay, and I can’t allow the bond and give someone so cruel control of this power. I can’t abandon the innocent Unseelie who’ve already suffered so much from his rule.

“Bond with me,” he growls. “And this ends.”

“No.” My voice shakes three times on the single syllable, but my chin is high.

Mordeus slices the blade across her throat, and blood burbles from her mouth and neck, covering his hand before she falls to the floor.

When he opens his hand again, his magic flares, and another girl appears in the first girl’s place. This one can’t be more than twelve. She fights his grip, and the knife at her neck bites into her skin as she looks desperately around the throne room.

“I have dozens upon dozens of humans at my disposal, all bought and paid for thanks to the greed of your kind,” he says. “How many are you willing to sacrifice for your own selfish reasons? How many lives is your stubborn pride worth?”

The girl’s blue eyes are wild before landing on me. I watch the moment she takes me in. Then I see it there in a flash: hope.

Hope.

Even with another girl dead on the floor before her and a blade digging into her throat, she has hope.

I tap into that feeling and blanket the room in darkness. It’s Mordeus’s element but mine too, and I’m stronger than before. Invisible tendrils of power tether me to the throne and the court. I draw on all of it as I mentally wrap the night around each of his guards, locking them into little boxes of shadow just as I disappear into my own. The king loses his grip on the girl as he lunges forward to stop me, but I reappear behind him, the adamant knife Sebastian gave me in my hand. The moment he spins to face me, I plunge it into his heart.

Mordeus roars in pain, and everything moves in slow motion—his snarl as he grabs a handful of my hair, the hot, sticky blood from his chest pouring onto my fingers, and the keening cry of the young girl who’s fallen to her knees behind him.

Mordeus strikes with his bloody blade, aiming for my gut and finding his mark, but he falls to a heap on the ground before he can drive it home.

With shaking, bloody hands, I help the girl to her feet. “Do you have a safe place to go until I can get back to you?” Countless humans, he said. All just waiting to feed Mordeus’s power and extend his cursed life.

She nods. There are tears running down her face. “My sister,” she chokes out, and I realize she’s looking at the body of the first girl on the floor. The one I didn’t think fast enough to save.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. I’ve sacrificed so much to save my sister, but I let hers die. “So very sorry.”

She sinks to the floor to smooth her dead sister’s hair from her face, and the sight threatens to tear away my numbness. I don’t have the luxury for the pain or the terror that want to claim me. I have to go.

I snap a thread on my goblin bracelet.

Bakken’s eyes go wide when he surveys the scene before him, his gaze locking on the false king who is dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

“Take me to Finn’s catacombs.” I wipe my hands on my skirt, my stomach roiling at the smell of blood and the feel of it under my fingernails and soaking the silken sleep clothes that cling to my skin.

Bakken steps back and shakes his head. “You ask too much.”

“I always pay,” I say between clenched teeth. I squeeze the handle of the dagger in my hand so hard the threads in the hilt bite into my palm. “Take me to the shadow prince’s catacombs.”

“The location is a highly guarded secret. This isn’t your average information.”

Without thinking, I wrap my fist around my hair and use the bloody knife to sheer it all off. I shove the handful of hair toward him. “Here.”

His eyes bulge, and spittle drips from the corner of his mouth as he takes it from me. “Yes, Fire Girl.”

I close my eyes, prepared for the nausea that comes with moving through the world with a goblin, but it doesn’t help. When the world stops weaving beneath my feet and I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by darkness so deep even my eyes can’t quite make out where we are.

“I leave you now, Fire Girl.”

I sense more than see Bakken disappear, and I don’t try to stop him. The air is cold and smells of damp earth. We must be deep underground.

Mordeus thought he could drug me to convince me to bond myself to him. Then he thought he could use innocents to force me. Which means that Mordeus is as untrustworthy as everyone said and as devious as I feared. But I was prepared for Mordeus to be devious.

I wasn’t prepared for the same from Finn.

All this time, that’s why Finn helped me. He was hoping I would fall for him and eventually trust him enough to bond with him. He planned to claim my life force and with it the magic crown I didn’t even know I carried.