Chapter 254: Save him

Genevieve’s POV

I felt the air leave my lungs. The room seemed to tilt beneath my feet, the damp stone walls suddenly closing in around me like the sides of a grave.

"His soul is weak," Lysander continued, his voice smooth and methodical, dropping each word into the quiet hall like a heavy stone into a deep well.

"Stunted. Fragile. It has spent years in the dark, withered away under the weight of my presence. Do you think separating me from him is wise, Luna?"

He leaned down slightly, staring straight into my face. His eyes, Nicholas’s beautiful, familiar brown eyes, bored straight into mine, stripping away every defense I had left.

"If I am forced out now without a blood anchor... he will shatter," Lysander said, his voice dropping into a soft, terrible promise.

"And he will die."

"No," I choked out, desperately shaking my head as tears finally burned the back of my eyes. "That’s not true. You are lying to me! You are just trying to protect yourself!"

Lysander shrugged, completely unfazed by my outburst. He straightened up, smoothing down the front of his dark tunic with a slow, deliberate hand.

"Do you think I would risk my own life by lying about this?" he asked softly.

He stepped closer again, until his face was only inches from mine. I could see the tiny fan of eyelashes near his cheek, the slight curve of his ear, details I had memorized the day he was born.

"If he dies... I die too," Lysander whispered right against my ear.

"I don’t want him to die, Genevieve. Because I don’t want to die; our lives are woven together now. You rip the thread, and the whole cloth falls apart."

His words hit me like a physical blow, sending a shockwave straight through my body.

I wanted to believe he was lying. I desperately wanted to scream in his face, to call him a monster and tear his hands away from my son’s body.

I wanted to believe there was another way, some hidden spell or ancient rite that could clean Nicholas’s soul without leaving a mark.

But the way he said it. The cold, unyielding truth ringing in his voice. The simple, brutal logic that he had no reason to keep Nicholas alive unless it served his own survival...

I no longer knew what to believe. My mind was spinning, torn violently between the terror of being manipulated and the sheer, paralyzing fear of causing my own son’s death.

Lysander reached down to his belt and pulled something free. Metal scraped against leather, a high, thin sound that cut cleanly through the quiet room.

He held it out to me.

He placed a blade in my hands.

It was heavy. The metal felt ice-cold against my palm, the edge honed so sharp I could feel the danger of it even without touching the steel.

Ancient symbols were etched along the flat of the blade, dark and thirsty.

"To save him... I need a blood anchor," Lysander said calmly, his eyes fixed on my face as my fingers automatically curled around the hilt.

"The blood of an Alpha family. From another pack line entirely. It has to be pure, untainted by your bloodline, to seal the rift when I pull back."

He turned his head slightly, gesturing toward the far corner where the two unconscious women hung motionless from their chains.

"That is why I brought them here," Lysander said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion.

"You must cast the spell, cut them open. And must drain them."

I stared down at the blade resting in my trembling hands. The reflected torchlight glinted off the polished silver, casting strange, wicked patterns across my knuckles.

"To save your son, Genevieve," Lysander whispered, stepping back to give me space, his hands folding behind his back as if he were nothing more than a spectator.

"Or watch him die. The choice is yours."

Slowly, I turned my head to look at Elisa and Alisa. Their faces were completely peaceful in sleep, their breathing steady and quiet.

They had no idea where they were. They did not know what was about to happen to them, or that their lives were being weighed on a scale against a mother’s desperate love.

Then I looked back at Nicholas.

His face was watching me. My son’s face. The boy I had failed to protect all those years ago. The child whose laughter used to fill the hallways of our home before the shadow came and swallowed him whole.

I knew this was horrifying. I knew this was completely, undeniably wrong. To harm two innocent women to save my own flesh and blood went against everything a Luna was supposed to stand for.

But the Alpha King’s words were lodged deep in my heart like a poisoned splinter, festering with every beat.

Nicholas had been trapped in the dark for years. His soul was fragile, battered, and weak. If the Alpha King were forced out right now without a blood anchor to hold my son’s spirit to the living world, Nicholas would die.

He would shatter into nothing, and I would be left holding his empty shell.

And I could not lose him again. I simply couldn’t survive it.

I gripped the hilt of the blade harder, the metal biting into my skin until my knuckles turned stark white.

"I can’t," I whispered, the words barely carrying across the cold space between us.

Lysander tilted his head, his pale eyes narrowing as he took a single, slow step toward me.

"Are you sure?"

*****

Azura’s POV

We were standing at the jagged edge of Wraithfen.

The dark castle loomed ahead of us like a giant beast sleeping in the shadow of the mountains. But the sky above it was completely wrong.

A thick, crimson beam of light rose straight from the center of the fortress, shooting high into the heavy storm clouds. It looked like something ancient and ravenous inside the walls was feeding on the earth itself.

Rhydor was already at the perimeter, his boots sinking slightly into the damp dirt. He was looking up at the high stone towers, his jaw set so tight the muscles in his face twitched.

"What is that?" I asked softly, stepping up beside him as the cold wind whipped my hair across my cheeks.

"I don’t know," Rhydor replied, his voice dropping into a cold, lethal register.

"But the energy coming from there... it’s really, really bad."

Behind us, the ambient air snapped like dry wood as the Dragon King finished teleporting the rest of the group. Amanda was the last one to step out of the shadows, looking slightly breathless but standing firm on her feet.

I turned around and looked directly at the Dragon King.

"Take me in there," I said, my voice firm and sharp.

Rhydor turned his head instantly, his eyes flashing with dark fury.

"No."

I did not even look at him. My eyes stayed locked on the Dragon King’s unreadable pale face.

"Take me in there," I repeated, stepping forward until I was right in front of him.

Before Rhydor could reach out to grab my shoulder, I reached up and touched the heavy dark fabric of the Dragon King’s sleeve. The world folded in on itself in a split second.

I heard Rhydor’s panicked voice shout my name from somewhere far away, but the sound was swallowed whole by the shift in space. We were already gone.

We appeared instantly inside the deep bowels of the castle.

It was pitch black, lit only by a few scattered torches mounted in rusted brackets along the damp stone walls.

The air was suffocatingly thick with that same red energy, pressing against my skin like a heavy wool blanket pulled straight out of a fire.

It made my chest ache with every breath I took.

We followed the glowing red veins pulsing through the cracks in the floorboards.

A massive iron door blocked our path at the end of the long corridor. It was locked from the inside, reinforced with heavy metal bars and spell runes designed to keep intruders out.

Without saying a single word, the Dragon King reached over his shoulder and pulled his sword from his back. The weapon was breathtakingly massive, broad steel that stretched nearly as long as a full-grown man.

He shifted his weight, gripped the hilt with both hands, and swung it in a smooth, brutal arc.

The iron door did not just open. It shattered into a hundred jagged pieces, exploding inward with a deafening crack.

We stepped through the clearing smoke into the chamber beyond.

Three flat stone tables stood in a row near the far wall. On two of them lay my aunts. Elisa and Alisa were completely motionless, their faces pale and their eyes closed in an unnatural sleep.

Thick, translucent tubes ran from their wrists, pulling glowing streams of liquid life directly out of their veins.

In the center table lay Lysander, his physical body resting flat on his back. Genevieve was standing right over him, her eyes wild and her hands glowing with a bright, terrifying aura as she drew the ancestral blood straight out of my aunts and fed it into his open chest.

"No!" I screamed, the sound tearing out of my throat.

A sudden, violent wave of raw power exploded from my chest, rippling outward through the damp air. It struck Genevieve squarely in the side, shattering her concentration and throwing her backward off her feet.