CHAPTER 160: THE PRICE OF CUTTING
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CELESTE'S POV
The world didn't go still after I drove the blade into my own chest.
It screamed.
Stone shrieked like metal tearing in half. The air shuddered so violently that my teeth ached. Every hair on my arms lifted, and the taste of iron coated my tongue. The threads inside me — no, not inside, through me — pounded with three separate rhythms.
Kael's thread burned hot enough that the space between us felt like an open forge, heat rippling off him in waves. Darius's was a cold, steady throb, the pulse of something that had already died and kept moving out of stubbornness alone. Zarian's was heavy, weighted with a silence so deep it could grind a soul to dust.
And all three belonged to me now.
The Queen was gone, yet her voice coiled through the air like smoke, silk wrapped around steel.
"You think you've won, Vessel? You've only made yourself the gate… and the lock."
