Camilla moved immediately with startling speed, a blur of midnight silk and cold intent. Tears—not of sorrow, but of raw, seething fury—gathered in her eyes, making them glisten like shattered glass.
"You slut. You whore."
Her hand shot out, snatching Aurelia's wrist—the injured one, freshly bandaged by Tenebrarum's own hands. Camilla's fingers clamped down like iron teeth, digging mercilessly into the white wrappings.
"Ahhhhh—!"
Aurelia's scream tore from her lungs, raw and guttural. The pain was immediate and blinding, a white-hot lance shooting up her arm and through her entire body. Tenebrarum had just bandaged it—had touched her there with an almost clinical care. Now, Camilla was shredding that fragile barrier between wound and air.
"You think I don't know?" Camilla hissed, her voice trembling with rage. "You purposely hurt yourself so you could lay with him—so he'd touch you, tend to you." She let out a sharp, humorless laugh, her fingers twisting deeper into the bandages.
A fresh, wet warmth bloomed beneath her grip. The pristine white linen darkened swiftly, saturated with crimson. Blood seeped through, dripping in thick, slow drops onto the stone floor.
"No—let me be!" Aurelia sobbed, her body buckling under the agony. She dropped to her knees, her free hand flailing weakly, trying to pry Camilla's fingers away. But it was useless—like trying to bend stone.
Camilla leaned down, her face close to Aurelia's tear-streaked one.
"You wanted his attention," she whispered, her breath hot against Aurelia's cheek. "Now you have mine."
Tears fell endlessly from both their eyes—one from agony, the other from fury—yet in that moment they looked like predator and prey, bound in a cruel, silent dance.
"Stopppp! Tenebrarum will kill you! Don't hurt her!" Sorana thrashed against the two attendants, but every movement earned her a brutal smash of her face into the stone floor. The sound was sickening, wet, and repetitive.
Camilla did not even glance her way.
"She's not even screaming enough," Camilla murmured, almost to herself. Her free hand began to shift—the skin rippling, bones elongating, fingers stretching into long, sharp claws. She drove them deeper into Aurelia's wounded hand, past the bandages, past flesh, into the raw, vulnerable ruin beneath.
"STOPPPP—!"
Aurelia's scream broke, raw and shattered. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears flooding out as the pain became something beyond feeling—a white, consuming void. She could no longer feel her own hand, only the searing, all-consuming invasion of claws where her bones should be.
Her body collapsed, vision blurring into streaks of torchlight and shadow. She struggled weakly, a ragged gasp catching in her throat, her world narrowing to nothing but pain, and the cold, satisfied gaze of the woman who was breaking her.
"Just die."
Camilla shoved her fully to the floor, then knelt over her, pinning Aurelia's body between her knees. Her clawed hand—still slick with Aurelia's blood—moved to her throat. Fingers, sharp and merciless, tightened harshly, biting deep into the tender skin.
Aurelia's breath choked into nothing. Her eyes widened, the violet glow fading, the whites overtaking them as her air was cut off. Darkness crowded the edges of her sight.
Is this how I'll die?
A silent scream echoed in her mind.
No. I can't. Not like this.
Her hand, slick with her own blood, shifted weakly across the floor—not in surrender, but in blind, desperate reach. Her fingers brushed the leg of a heavy wooden table beside them. She didn't think. She didn't plan.
She just pushed.
Not with her arm. Not with her battered body.
But with something else—a force that surged from a place deep within her, a well she never knew existed. It was raw, untamed, and vast.
A wave of invisible energy erupted from her touch.
THUD.
Camilla was thrown backward as if struck by a battering ram. She slammed into the far wall with a sickening crack of stone and a choked cry, crumpling to the floor in a heap of silk and tangled limbs.
Silence, sharp and total, swallowed the room.
Aurelia slumped forward, gasping, blood dripping from her ruined hand onto the stone. She stared at her own palm—pale, trembling, smeared red.
Where had that come from? She was bleeding, broken, at the edge of consciousness… yet she felt no pain in that moment. Only a strange, humming emptiness, as if she had tapped into something and now it was gone.
Is this death? she wondered, dazed.
But no. Death did not throw your enemies across the room.
Sorana stared, her face still pressed to the floor, her eyes wide with shock. The two attendants holding her had frozen, their grips slackening in pure disbelief.
Everyone in the room had seen it. No one could explain it.
Least of all Aurelia, who looked from her bloodied hand to Camilla's motionless form, and felt not triumph, but a deep, chilling fear of what she had just become.
Her violet eyes remained wide, fixed on her own palm as if it belonged to someone else. The blood dripped steadily from her fingertips, dark and slick against the pale skin of her wrist, but she felt none of it. No sting, no ache, no warmth. It was as if her mind had severed the connection to her own body in the wake of that impossible surge of power.
But perhaps she was distracted for too long.
A shadow fell over her. A scrape of silk against stone.
A ragged, furious breath.
She didn't look up in time.
THWACK!
The blow was not an open-handed slap. It was a closed-fist strike, hard and brutal, catching her across the cheekbone with a sound like cracking ice.
Aurelia head snapped violently to the side, neck wrenching, vision erupting into white sparks. Blood—hot and metallic—flooded her mouth, bursting from her split lip and spraying in a fine mist across the stone floor.
That, she felt.
All the pain she had been spared moments before came rushing back in a single, crashing wave. The agony in her mauled hand, the throbbing in her throat, the sharp, sickening ache in her face—it all collided at once, a symphony of torment that stole the air from her lungs.
She crumpled, her body giving out. Her face struck the cold floor with a dull, wet thud. Her left eye pulsed immediately, the skin around it tightening and swelling, a hot, heavy mask of flesh forming over the bone. She could feel it closing, vision in that eye already blurring into a haze of red and shadow.
Through the one eye that could still see, watery and strained, she saw Camilla standing over her, breathing hard, her own face a mask of fury and pain. One of Camilla's arms hung at an awkward angle, likely broken from the impact with the wall, but it did nothing to dim the murderous light in her blue eyes.
"Hallot," Camilla hissed, the word dripping with venom and a dawning, terrified understanding. "You filthy, slut."
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To be continued...