House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas

So Ruhn stepped forward. “I’ll trade you. Me, for them.”

Any other opponent would have dismissed it. But Pollux looked him over with a cruel, hungry sort of curiosity.

Ruhn snarled, saying the words he hadn’t dared voice until now, “She’s my mate, you fucker.”

Lidia inhaled a sharp breath.

Ruhn taunted the Hammer, “You want me to tell you how she said we measured up?” Crass, crude words—but ones he knew would strike the Hammer’s fragile ego.

The blow landed. “I’ll kill the lot of you,” Pollux seethed, his beautiful face ugly with rage.

“Nah,” Ruhn said. “You touch her or the boys, and your attention will be split. Giving me the opening I need to blast you to Hel.”

He should have taken that shot when Tharion attacked. He’d wasted the mer’s blow—and now Tharion was lying on the ground, alarmingly still, blood leaking from a hole in his chest.

“Ruhn,” Lidia warned.

“But,” Ruhn went on smoothly, “you hand over the boys unharmed, you let them and Lidia and Tharion go, and I’ll walk right up to you. With no guns, no magic. You can pull me apart piece by piece. Take all the time you want.”

“Ruhn,” Lidia’s voice broke.

He didn’t look at her. Didn’t have the strength to see whatever was in her eyes. He knew she hated him for putting that bullet in her thigh—but it had been to save her. To keep them from this terrible fate that they’d all arrived at anyway.

So he said to her, mind-to-mind, I love you. I fell in love with you in the depths of my soul, and it’s my soul that will find yours again in the next life.

He shut off the connection between them before she could reply.

Then Ruhn faced the white-winged angel, lifting his hands. “All yours, Hammer.”





94


Unarmed, Ruhn kept his gaze on the Malleus. “What’s it gonna be, Pollux?”

Lidia’s sons were watching him closely. Lidia said nothing. But the Hammer looked toward her. “I don’t see why I can’t have everything I want,” the angel said. Then grinned at Ruhn. “Wait your turn, princeling.”

It happened so fast.

Pollux pivoted to the boys. Fixed his stare on Brann. Pure, brute power flared around the angel.

Lidia screamed as Pollux unleashed a lethal spear of his power toward Brann.

Ruhn couldn’t turn away. Didn’t want to watch, and yet he knew he had to witness this crime, this unforgivable atrocity—

But Lidia ran, swift as the wind. Swifter than a bullet.

Ruhn didn’t understand what he saw next: How Lidia reached Brann in time. How she threw herself over her son, knocking him to the ground as she burst into white-hot flames.

They erupted from her like a brimstone missile, blasting Pollux off his feet. Not some freak accident or bomb, but fire magic, pouring out of Lidia. Searing from her.

“Brann,” she was panting down at her son, the boy untouched by the flame, scanning his stunned face, tugging the gag from his mouth. “Brannon.” She stifled a sob around the boy’s full name, but then Actaeon was there, hauling his brother away as best he could with the bonds still restraining them.

“What are you?” Ace breathed.

Still panting, blazing with fire, Lidia said, “An old bloodline,” and got to her feet.

It was Daybright, as Ruhn had seen her in his mind. She’d presented herself—her true self—to him all this time.

“Get them out of here,” Lidia said to Ruhn, hair floating up in a golden halo, embers swirling around her head. “Get the mer to a healer.” It was a miracle that Tharion wasn’t already dead, given the hole blasted through him.

Pollux got to his feet. “You cunt,” he spat. “What the fuck is this?”

“Shifters, as they used to be,” Lidia said, fire rippling from her mouth. “As Danika Fendyr told me we were. Now free of the Asteri’s parasite.”

Ruhn gaped at her. She was free of the parasite? She must have gotten that antidote, somehow—from Tharion?

Lidia was glorious, wreathed in flame and blazing with fury.

Pollux’s power surged again. “I’ll kill you all the same, bitch.”

“You can try,” Lidia said, smiling.

Pollux ran at her, striking with his magic. The hallway shook, debris raining down—

A wall of blue fire leapt between them. Pollux collided with it, then stuck. A fly in a burning web.

Lidia stalked toward the angel as Pollux struggled against the flames.

“You signed your death warrant when you touched my sons,” she said. And exhaled a breath.

Flame rippled from her mouth into Pollux’s flesh. The angel screamed—or tried to.

Freed of any secrets, of any need to keep them, Lidia seemed to unleash all that she was. Ruhn could only watch as fire poured down Pollux’s throat. Into his body. Roasting him from the inside out until he was nothing but smoldering cinders, a pillar of brimstone standing mid-strike, mouth still open.

She’d incinerated him.

Lidia held out a finger. And poked the towering pillar that had once been Pollux.

It sent Pollux’s ash-statue crumbling to the ground.

Her sons got to their feet, shock stark on their battered faces. The knife in Ruhn’s boot helped him make quick work of prying open their gorsian shackles, but it was Actaeon who whispered to Lidia, “Mom?”