Chapter 34 Condemnation
- I opened my eyes to darkness. A darkness so deep it felt like it was swallowing me whole. The damp, icy stone walls pressed in on me, as if they, too, condemned me to this small cell, tucked away in the farthest corner of the palace dungeons. Days had passed—I’d lost count—and I’d seen no one. Not Grey, not Blue, not even Lea. I was alone, a prisoner in every sense, with nothing but the suffocating weight of grief and the relentless bite of the silver chain around my ankle, searing into my skin.
- Yet the physical pain was nothing. The raw, gaping wound in my heart made everything else fade to numbness. Levi and Bea were gone, ripped from my life. My family, the only ones who truly knew me… gone. I kept replaying that moment when I found them, the blood, the horror. And then Astrid’s mocking smile flashed through my mind, her words echoing like a curse.
- “You will regret this,” she had said. “You’ll lose everyone.”