Chapter 3

Lucas moved fast. He was set to extract my younger brother tonight. As long as my brother was safe, I could vanish without a single ghost holding me back.

But Seraphina must have sensed the shift in the wind. To eradicate me once and for all, the venomous woman orchestrated a lethal endgame.

That evening at dusk, as I was packing the last of my belongings in my chamber, a bloodcurdling shriek pierced the silence of the corridor.

I sprinted out, only to find Seraphina collapsed in a pool of her own ruby blood. Protruding from her chest was a familiar dagger—the very weapon Valerius had gifted me for self-defense.

The blade had been generously slathered in high-concentration holy water, violently corroding the flesh around her heart.

"Elara... why would you do this...?" Seraphina gasped, looking up at me. Yet, shielded from the hallway's view, a malicious, triumphant smirk tugged at the corners of her dying lips.

Before I could even part my lips to speak, a suffocating aura of terror crushed the air out of the corridor.

Valerius manifested like a dark god tearing through the fabric of space. The instant he saw Seraphina in the blood, his crimson eyes were utterly eclipsed by a berserk, murderous rage.

"Seraphina!" He dropped his knees, scooping her into his arms. He desperately channeled his dark magic to halt the holy water's spread, but the corrosive dose had already singed the veins near her heart.

"Valerius... it burns so much..." Seraphina whimpered, breathless. "Elara said... if I was dead, you would finally go back to her..."

Valerius's head snapped toward me, his glare pinning me in place.

"It wasn't me," I tried to defend myself.

"Who else could possibly have access to this blade?!" he roared. The sheer sonic force of his magic violently fractured the stone walls around us, sending spiderweb cracks tracing up the masonry.

He rose to his full height, stalking toward me with lethal intent. "Elara, do you truly believe I won't kill you?"

"Your Highness!" A blood thrall scrambled down the hall, slipping in his panic, his voice vibrating with terror. "The half-blood boy—he tried to escape!"

Valerius froze. A heartbeat later, an unbelievably cruel, sadistic sneer twisted his lips.

"Escape?" He raised a hand, and a vortex of dark magic materialized over his palm.

The next second, my heart seized violently in my chest. Suspended in the dead center of the storm was my ten-year-old brother, dangling high in the air, a pitch-black magical chain choking the life out of his fragile neck.

"Let him go!" I shrieked, lunging at him like a madwoman.

Valerius casually kicked me hard in the chest, sending me crashing to the floor. He stood over me, looking down like a wrathful deity: "You possess the Healing Blood, don't you, Elara? Now, trade your life for Seraphina's. Bleed yourself dry for her—every last drop. Do it, or I will throw your pathetic brother onto the Eclipse Terrace and let the daylight incinerate him into ash!"

He was insane. Completely deranged.

For the sake of a congenital liar, he was leveraging the one life I valued above all others.

Slowly, I forced myself off the floor, wiping the blood from a split lip.

I closed my eyes, recklessly igniting every remaining drop of Healing Blood and my very soul essence. A blinding, golden light erupted from my core, instantaneously shattering Valerius's magical suppression.

"What are you doing?!" Sensing the fatal shift in the atmosphere, Valerius surged forward to stop me.

Too late. I had already channeled the entirety of my life force into an intricate teleportation matrix, enveloping my suspended brother perfectly. In a flash of light, his figure vanished from thin air, hurled far away into Lucas's designated absolute safe zone.

With that final spell cast, my mana reserves utterly withered. The fire of my life force flickered, as fragile as a dying candle in a hurricane.

I stumbled backward. One step. Two steps. I didn't stop until my spine met the frigid glass of the colossal floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the hall. Beyond the glass lay a bottomless abyss, plunging straight down into the roaring, pitch-black ocean waves.

"Elara, get over here! Now!" Valerius bellowed, lunging toward me in absolute fury.

Staring at the monstrous, unfamiliar man before me, a sudden, breathy laugh slipped past my lips.

"Valerius... you wanted my life, right?" Extracting a silver blade from my boot, without a millisecond of hesitation, I plunged it violently right into my own heart.

Hot blood geysered onto my hands. In that very same heartbeat, deep within my soul, the ethereal tether that bound our lives—the Blood Pact—snapped.

"NO—!!!"

In the exact fraction of a second the pact shattered, a violent, desperate struggle seized Valerius's crimson eyes.

Immediately after, that suffocating, bloody red receded like a vanquished tide, replaced violently by a profound, agonizing dark gold.

Driven by the terminal shock of feeling his soulmate dying, his lucid persona had brutally ripped through the indestructible chains of the century-old curse!

"Elara! NO!" Awoken to reality, Valerius let out a soul-tearing, agonizing howl. His previously cruel visage utterly shattered, contorting into sheer, unadulterated terror and blinding despair. He hurled himself toward me like a madman, his hands violently outstretched to grab me.

I offered him a bitter, broken smile, tasting the metallic copper of my own blood.

"Valerius... we end here."

I let gravity take me, tilting backward to plummet into the bottomless abyss.

"ELARA—!!!"

He crashed into the shattered window frame, his fingertips brutally grazing the fabric of my coat, grasping at nothing but the freezing air.

As I rapidly plummeted into the terrifying void, in the final second before I closed my eyes, I saw the untouchable Supreme Prince drop to his knees, unleashing a bloodcurdling, guttural scream like a dying beast.