SERAPHINA’S POV
I had expected Catherine to be calculating.
I had expected her to be cruel.
What I had not expected was how calm she looked after it was done, as though everything that had just happened inside this ruined battlefield—the puppet, the suffering, the collapsing remnants of her own carefully constructed chaos—had merely been a minor inconvenience she had already finished sorting through.
She stood still in her barrier like a queen surveying a battlefield she had already won.
The air around her still trembled faintly with residual corruption, dark threads of stolen power curling and retracting into her like obedient snakes returning to a master’s hand.
I could feel it even from where I stood, still in Alina’s form, my senses stretched thin and razor-sharp with fury.
Catherine had not only survived the chaos of her own creation, but she had also absorbed it, digested it, and made it part of herself.
Her gaze landed on me with slow amusement.
