Violet's POV
The weight of Zain's body against mine was terrifyingly heavy. The heat radiating from his skin only moments ago had turned into a violent, unnatural fever, his muscles convulsing in a jagged, rhythmic pattern that I could feel directly through my own skin.
Beneath my palms, his dark, thick blood kept seeping around the shaft of the silver bolt, hot and steaming against the damp forest air. But it was the black veins, the toxic, crawling web of the concentrated eclipse-root that made my stomach violently heave. It was traveling up his neck, mapping out the contours of his jaw, fighting to reach his brain and shut down the god inside him.
"Stand up, Violet," April repeated.
The sound of her boots stepping closer was slow, measured, and entirely unbothered by the agonizing groans of the Demon Alpha dying at her feet. She was a Hawthorne commander executing a routine harvest. Nothing more.
