Marrying a Warhound (Cassian) novel Chapter 108

ATASHA’S POV

Have you ever felt a pain that teaches you the shape of death?

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I asked myself that as the pressure clawed through my ribs. I tried to breathe around it and found it impossible.

For a moment I wondered if anyone had ever felt this and survived.

The answer arrived as heat and shock. It began deep inside my chest and raced outward like something burning through me from the core.

It was not a single ache but a series of blows, each one sharper than the last. My lungs seized as if someone had wrapped iron bands around them. My head felt hollowed, and the world narrowed to a tunnel of white pain. Muscles clenched until they trembled. I tasted copper, then nothing but a dry mouth and the metallic sting of blood somewhere at the back of my throat.

Heat flared across my skin so fast I thought I would blister, then cold followed. My vision trembled, then blurred. Shapes stretched and folded. The tent, the faces, the spears, all of it bent away until the only real point left was the burn, and the box, and the sound of my own ragged breath.

I tried to move. My hands wanted to drop the box, to shove it away and crush it into the dirt, but my arms felt like lead. My limbs did not obey. I pressed my teeth together until the pain shifted to my jaw instead. An animal sound rose somewhere in the tent, a scream that might have been a person or might have been the world itself tearing, but even that was muffled under the roar in my skull.

Colors slipped away. The torchlight thinned to ash. The faces near me broke up into blurs and mouths that moved without sound.

When the black began to claim me, a fresh noise sliced through.

“Witch!” someone yelled.

The word echoed, multiplied, a dozen throats joining in. The sound was close and then far. I heard Reina’s voice and other voices answering, some with fear, some with hate. The single syllable kept repeating until it hammered into the last clear place in my head.

Witch.

I asked it back to myself, Witch? The mind that was left searched for meaning like groping for a lamp in fog.

What is a witch? I tried to pull at the memory of the lessons, of stories told in cold kitchens, of crackling fires and old women’s faces, but everything had narrowed to the single, impossible feel of the box and the burning in my veins.

How could I be a witch? I had never wanted to be anything but someone who kept her mouth shut and her hands to herself. I had used what I had when people needed it and hid it when they did not.

Witch. The word felt foreign and sudden and very precise. It fitted something I could not name. My thoughts

14:19 Mon, Sep 22

Chapter 108

slipped, trying to make sense of accusation and fear and the way the stone screamed at me.

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The darkness pushed harder. The last thing I registered before the world swallowed the edges of me was the feel of my own fingers closing tighter around the stone, as if it were the only thing left to hold on to.

CASSIAN VALEMONT’S POV (Third Person)

The stink, the screams, the weight of bodies piling under his boots, this was where he thrived.

Cassian split a beast from jaw to spine, the blade crunching through bone, and used its falling body as a step to vault higher onto the parapet. Another lunged over the rubble, but he met it in the air and drove his sword down its throat until the skull cracked apart. Hot blood sprayed across his face, and he welcomed it. This was where he belonged.

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