Chapter 198: Dead Goddess Walking
**Avery**
The name settled in the center of the room like a drop of poison in a glass of water, tainting everything. The Goddess.
It wasn’t a name spoken with reverence. It was a curse, an answer, a final, horrifying puzzle piece sliding into place. The silence in the conference room was no longer just heavy; it was suffocating, thick with the weight of a war that had been waged in the shadows for millennia. My life—the orphanage, the loneliness, the attacks, Cora’s madness—it wasn’t a series of tragic coincidences. It was a calculated campaign. I was a target on a cosmic chessboard, and I’d never even known I was a player.
James’s words echoed in the stillness, a damning verdict that re-wrote our entire reality. I looked at my mates, seeing the same dawning horror reflected in their eyes. This was bigger than rival clans, bigger than ancient feuds. This was a battle against a primordial force that had tried to eradicate their entire race.
A cold, clear rage began to burn in my veins, displacing the shock. It was a clean, purifying fire, burning away the last vestiges of the helpless girl I once was. They thought they could break me, erase me, use me as a pawn? They had made a fatal miscalculation. They hadn’t accounted for me. They hadn’t accounted for us.
I pushed away from James’s arm, stepping forward to the head of the table. The wood was cool and solid beneath my palms. I felt the power of my lineage—the shadow and the flame—rise within me, not as a chaotic force, but as a focused, lethal weapon. The soft, rhythmic pulse from the bracelet on my wrist was a steady drumbeat, a call to arms.
“Well,” I said, my voice cutting through the oppressive silence, clear and sharp as shattered glass. Every head snapped towards me. “Now we know the enemy.” A slow, predatory smile touched my lips. “And we know how to end her.”
My gaze swept over each of my mates, lingering on their fierce, beloved faces. “She fears me. She made that mistake clear when she sent her puppets after me. She fears this union.” My hand went to my growing baby bump, a gesture of pure, unadulterated defiance. “And she is terrified of the lives growing inside me.”
I turned my head, my eyes finding Donn. He was watching me with an intensity that stole my breath, the ancient sorrow in his expression warring with a flicker of nascent hope.
“I will reunite my family,” I declared, the words a vow, a prophecy spoken into existence. “I will bring my fathers and my mother back to this realm. I will find a way to break the cage that holds all supernaturals she enslaved.” The promise was for him, but the conviction was for all of us. “They will be eternal, just as we are. The old world will be reborn from the ashes, and we will be its guardians.”
I pushed off the table, a surge of exhilarating power making me feel weightless. I looked at the ceiling, as if I could stare down the Goddess herself through the stone and sky.
“She won’t win,” I hissed, the words dripping with contempt and absolute certainty. “She is dead. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
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