There's blood in my mouth, and I smile anyway.
Sylas whistles low under his breath, stepping lightly over the broken training dummies scattered across the field.
"You know," he says, grinning, "most Queens prefer tea and cake before they kill someone."
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, tasting iron and fury.
"I'm not most Queens," I mutter.
Sylas snorts. "Yeah, no kidding. You're our favorite homicidal princess."
The sun hangs heavy and low, stained red like a battlefield sky. Somewhere deep in the woods, something screams — a raw, tearing sound that cuts the air open.
Good.
Let the forest remember what walks through it today.
It's been two days since I started the final phase of training. Two days of endless drills, bruises, and bleeding. Two days closer to my twenty-first birthday — the day everything will change.
I should be focused.
I should be sharpening myself into a weapon.
Instead, my mind slips into the places I try to bury.
My parents.
I clench my fists tighter, but the memories rise anyway, heavy and unwanted.
They loved each other across forbidden bloodlines — vampire and wolf.
In our world, friendships between species are a tolerated scandal. But soulmates? Mating across species?
That's not just forbidden.
That's heresy.
My parents could have run.
They could have bowed to fear.
But they stayed.
They fought.
Because when you find your soulmate, there's no undoing it.
In our world, you know your mate instantly — the first moment your eyes meet. No questions. No doubts.
And once you fall in love, it only happens once.
One heart. One lifetime.
Lose them, and you don't survive long after.
I've never felt it.
Never once.
In a world where no one crushes, flirts, or feels anything romantic until destiny stitches your soul to another — I've been a hollow vessel.
But Darian…
Darian claims to know.
Claims that fate tied us together long before we were even born.
The only reason I know about him at all is because Sylas and my guardian whispered it to me — promises wrapped in mystery and silence.
How can they be so sure?
How can Darian be so certain we belong to each other when we've never even locked eyes across a battlefield, a ballroom, a bloodied courtyard?
What if they're wrong?
What if I'm broken?
And worse — what if I'm not?
What if meeting him is as violent and absolute as the old stories say?
What if there's no surviving it?
A bond so strong that it unravels everything else. A bond that kills if you lose it.
I suck in a breath, realizing my heartbeat is galloping out of control.
I am not afraid.
I am not—
Something whistles through the air.
I duck purely on instinct.
A dagger embeds itself into the tree trunk behind where my head had been a moment ago.
"You're welcome," Sylas calls lazily, already spinning another knife between his fingers. "You were spiraling. Figured I'd save the forest before you set it on fire."
I glare at him.
He winks.
Bastard.
"Two days left," Sylas says, strolling toward me like we're just discussing the weather. "Then you meet the all-powerful, totally terrifying Aven. Excited?"
I wipe the sweat from my face and snatch a dagger from the ground.
"Thrilled," I deadpan.
Sylas chuckles. "Wonder what he's gonna throw at you. Final exam style? Gladiator death match? Maybe he'll just toss you into the ocean and see if you swim."
I snort despite myself. "You know I'd swim. I'd drown the ocean first."
"Spoken like a true homicidal princess," Sylas says proudly.
We fall into a rhythm of tossing guesses back and forth — survival exercises, combat tests, political games.
But beneath the sarcasm, I can feel it: the weight.
The reminder that this isn't just training.
This is judgment.
A sharp flash of light slices the air between us.
I tense, reaching for my blade — but it's just a card, golden-edged and humming with low magic, appearing out of nowhere in Sylas's hand.
He blinks down at it.
"Well," he says, flipping the card so I can see the sigil burned into the surface — a black wolf entwined with a bleeding rose.
Aven's mark.
"Looks like your invitation just arrived, princess."
I stare at the card, my heart pounding harder than any battle could make it.
Two days of bleeding in the woods.
Two decades of hiding, waiting, training.
All of it had led here.
If my parents were alive, I'd be home with them right now.
I'd be safe.
I'd be whole.
But they aren't.
And the only thing left inside me is fire.
Aven has tested me before — sharpened my weaknesses, torn my pride apart, rebuilt me again under Darian's orders.
But this time, it's different.
This is the final measure.
And for the first time, a tiny cold thought snakes through my mind:
What happens if I fail?
I shove it down before it can root itself.
Failure isn't an option.
It never was.
I don't lose.
And I'm not about to start now.