SERAPHINA’S POV

The woman beside Lucian did not answer immediately.

She simply looked at me with those unnervingly familiar eyes, and something deep inside my instincts recoiled in confusion because nothing about her felt right.

She didn’t carry the hollow absence of Catherine’s puppets, nor the fractured corruption clinging to rogues altered beyond recognition.

Her presence felt...layered. Like standing in front of a mirror submerged beneath dark water, where the reflection moved a fraction too slowly.

If she were indeed a puppet, Catherine must have taken her sweet, sweet time with her.

And then placed her beside Lucian like a chain made of flesh and memory.

I looked from her to him, and my voice came out lower than I intended.

“This is why?”

Lucian’s expression did not change, but pain shimmered in his eyes, raw and liquid. For a heartbeat, he looked so much like the man who had once stood beside me in the ashes of my life and offered his hand.

The wind shifted across the ridge, carrying the distant sounds of battle from the shoreline below.

Somewhere behind us, power exploded hard enough to shake leaves from the trees, and I knew Kieran and Damian were still tearing through each other with enough ferocity to split the island apart.

But here, silence pressed in, louder than a scream.

Maxwell moved slightly closer to me, his weapon lowering by only an inch.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered.

Lucian laughed once under his breath, though no amusement touched the sound. It quickly vanished beneath cold restraint as the pressure around him tightened.

I felt it now that I knew to look for it. Catherine’s control wrapped around him in invisible threads, subtle enough that another psychic might not have noticed, but to me, the distortion was impossible to ignore.

Lucian was fighting something every second he stood here. And he was losing.

“You’re too late,” he said quietly.

Maxwell stiffened. “For what?”

Lucian’s eyes lifted toward the sky.

Instinctively, mine followed.

The sun still shone above the island, but shadows had begun creeping slowly across its surface. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than shifting cloud cover.

Then my stomach dropped.

An eclipse. Like the one Catherine had caused when we first confronted her.

A cold pulse went through the island beneath my feet.

Lucian saw the realization hit me.

“Catherine is almost finished,” he said.

The air seemed to constrict around us.

“What does that mean?” I demanded.

For a moment, he simply looked at me, and the grief in his eyes made my chest ache, because it was the same expression he had worn the day he confessed Zara’s death to me back at OTS.

Only now there was something even worse beneath it.

Helplessness.

“When the eclipse reaches totality,” he said softly, “the barrier will close completely.”

“And then?” Maxwell asked sharply.

Lucian’s gaze shifted toward him.

“Everyone inside Catherine’s domain becomes hers.”

Horror crashed over us.

“No,” I whispered.

Lucian’s expression hardened with bitter certainty.

“She’s using the island itself as a psychic amplifier. The barrier, the blood rituals, the puppets, the altered rogues...all of it has been feeding the final stage.” His voice roughened. “Once the eclipse is complete, Catherine won’t need collars or conditioning anymore. She’ll overwrite every mind trapped within the barrier.”

My pulse stumbled.

The warriors behind us shifted uneasily.

Maxwell swore viciously under his breath.

“She can’t control all of us,” one Frostbane operative said, though uncertainty cracked through his voice.

Lucian looked at him with exhausted pity.

“You don’t understand what she’s become.”

Zara finally moved.

Only a step.

But psychic pressure rolled outward from her so suddenly that several warriors behind me staggered.

My eyes widened.

Gods, even damaged, even restrained, she was powerful.

The air distorted faintly around her as an invisible force swept through the entrance hall behind them. Lights flickered. The stone beneath our feet groaned softly.

Lucian closed his eyes.

“Zara,” he said quietly, and something fragile moved through the single word.

Her power steadied instantly.

My throat tightened.

She listened to him.

Not like a puppet obeying commands. Like someone holding onto the last familiar voice left in the dark.

“She doesn’t want to hurt you,” Lucian said without looking at me.

“Then move,” Maxwell snapped.

Lucian’s gaze lifted again. “I can’t.”

The invisible pressure around him constricted harder, and this time, the pain flickered openly across his face.

Catherine was listening.

Not actively, but enough to punish resistance.

“Lucian,” I said carefully, “if there’s any part of you that feels guilty, that wants to make amends, then help us stop her.”

Something terrible crossed his expression then.

Not refusal.

Fear.

But something told me it wasn’t for himself.

The words from his letter replayed in my mind.

‘The revived Zara is a leash he has hung around my neck to ensure I stay obedient; I can’t refuse him anything for fear of her getting hurt.’

Gods knew what horrors Catherine and Marcus had in store for Zara if Lucian disobeyed.

Another, stronger pulse moved through the island.

The shadows across the sun deepened.

My instincts screamed.

Time was running out.

“My mother’s below us, isn’t she?” I asked suddenly.

Lucian’s eyes snapped toward me.

I felt Sylvia faintly beneath the earth now that I stood this close, weak but unmistakable.

Lucian saw the answer settle across my face, and resignation settled on his.

Zara’s head tilted then, her gaze unfocusing for a brief moment as though listening to something far away.

Lucian noticed instantly.

His expression changed.

“Sera—”

“That’s enough chit chat,” Zara spoke, and the sound of her voice threw me off so much that I was unprepared for her attack.

The temperature around us dropped drastically, and psychic pressure slammed through the entrance hard enough to crack one of the stone columns beside the doorway.

“Goodbye, cousin,” she spat.

Invisible force exploded outward across the ridge, tearing through trees and sending several operatives flying backward hard enough to crash into the stone pathway.

“Move!” Maxwell shouted.

Chaos detonated.

The warriors surged forward as Zara’s psychic power crashed into ours in massive waves, elegant and devastating all at once.

She attacked like water pressure beneath ice, subtle until the exact second it shattered bone.

I threw silver power outward instinctively, intercepting the next psychic strike before it crushed two Nightfang wolves against the cliff wall.

The collision exploded through my skull, and pain burst behind my eyes.

Gods, she was terrifying.

Lucian moved then.

Darkness surged beneath his feet as he intercepted Maxwell with brutal force, stopping him from reaching Zara.

Steel clashed.

Maxwell snarled, “You traitorous son of a—”

Lucian disarmed him in one fluid motion before shoving him backward.

“Take Sera and go!” he snapped.

I froze.

Maxwell froze, too.

Lucian’s eyes found mine again, and for one impossible second, I understood exactly what he was doing.

Every movement he made redirected the others away from the entrance instead of toward me.

Every strike created openings instead of closing them. Even Zara’s attacks curved strangely around my position, devastating everyone near me without touching me directly.

He was buying us time inside the delay.

Catherine’s leash tightened around him immediately.

Blood suddenly spilled from Lucian’s nose.

Zara jerked beside him, her hand flying to her temple as pain flashed across her features, as if something invisible had cut through her mind.

My horror sharpened.

“Lucian—”

“GO!” he roared, and this time the command cracked with genuine desperation.

Another explosion sounded behind us.

Then suddenly, Kieran landed beside me.

Sand and broken stone sprayed across the entrance as Damian crashed through the upper terrace behind him hard enough to collapse part of the railing.

Kieran’s chest rose and fell heavily, blood streaking his throat and jaw, but Ashar’s murderous presence rolled through the air stronger than ever.

Relief hit me so hard it almost hurt.

“Kieran—”

“Brett and Maris are holding him.” His eyes flicked briefly toward Lucian and Zara before narrowing. “We don’t have time.”

Another psychic pulse tore through the ridge.

The eclipse shadows deepened overhead.

Lucian’s voice came low and rough. “The elevator at the end of the central corridor leads underground.”

His jaw tightened visibly, as though forcing the words through agony. “Level seven.”

Blood dripped steadily from his nose now.

Catherine was punishing him for every syllable.

Kieran’s gaze locked with Lucian’s for one long moment.

Then he gave a single sharp nod.

Warriors behind us reformed quickly around Maxwell while Lucian and Zara stepped forward together, blocking pursuit again.

“I’ll hold them here,” Maxwell said grimly.

“You sure?” Kieran asked.

Maxwell gave a humorless laugh while retrieving another blade from his belt. “Sureness stopped mattering several disasters ago.”

Despite everything, the corner of Kieran’s mouth twitched, a hint of grim amusement flickering.

Then he grabbed my hand.

“Let’s go.”

We ran.

The facility doors slid open automatically as we crossed the threshold, revealing a corridor so pristine it barely looked inhabited.

White floors gleamed beneath recessed lighting. Glass walls reflected our movement at us in fractured flashes.

The air smelled sterile, cold, and faintly chemical beneath the underlying stench of blood magic soaked invisibly into the structure itself.

Too quiet.

There should have been personnel. Scientists. Guards.

Instead, the facility felt abandoned in a hurry.

Our footsteps echoed sharply as we moved deeper inside.

Kieran stayed close beside me, one hand brushing mine occasionally as though reassuring himself I was still there.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

The honesty slipped out before I could soften it.

Kieran’s answer was to intertwine our hands, lending me strength the way only he knew how.

My throat tightened. “She’s close.”

The bond of blood beneath the earth pulled harder with every step now, faint but undeniable, like a heartbeat echoing upward through stone and steel.

The corridor opened into a massive central chamber lined with glass observation windows overlooking laboratories below.

Most stood empty now, equipment abandoned mid-use beneath flickering screens and overturned chairs.

My stomach twisted as we passed one lab where metal restraints hung open beside dried blood staining the floor.

Puppet experiments.

Kieran’s expression darkened murderously.

“We burn this place to the ground when this is over.”

“If Catherine leaves anything standing.”

The elevators waited at the far end of the chamber.

The moment we approached, every instinct inside me screamed.

Kieran reacted at the same instant.

We stopped sharply as the elevator doors slid open.

And Jack’s monstrous wolf form stepped out.