"You've been waiting for him to tell you the truth. But him? He's a coward. Even now, he still hasn't had the guts to come clean." His voice dripped with a taunting, singsong edge. Thora's gaze cut into him, her tone glacial. "That's between me and him. It's got nothing to do with you." A surge of raw fury flashed through his eyes, but he forced it down, his lips twisting into a cold smirk. "We share the same body. If you care about him, doesn't that mean you care about me too? Tell me, Thora—can you really tell us apart?" He stepped closer, his voice dipping into something honeyed and insidious. "When he first got close to you wearing my face, you didn't push him away, did you?" Thora stared at him, her expression frozen in steel. She said nothing. In a flash, the space where Draven stood flickered, and in the blink of an eye, he was right in front of her. Iron hands clamped down on her wrists. He pressed forward with suffocating intensity, trying to breach every wall she had. Thora's wrists were locked. She snapped her weight forward and down, swung a leg back in a vicious kick, and in the split second he dodged, wrenched her hands free with everything she had. But the very next instant, he lunged—no technique, no finesse, just brute force slamming her to the ground. Thora fought to move, but tendrils of black ability wave rippled out from his palms like living vines, coiling around her hands and binding them together with his in a grip that wouldn't break. Draven loomed over her, his gaze hazy, almost drunk. Her name fell from his lips again and again in a low, fractured murmur. "Thora ... Thora... How can you care about me less than you care about Darius?" Thora's brow furrowed hard. The face above her was identical to Darius's in every detail, but the person behind it was someone else entirely. He leaned down, gazing at her like she was a treasure that didn't exist anywhere else in the world. The pad of his index finger traced a slow line from the tip of her nose to the corner of her mouth. Those crimson pupils contracted sharply. Something savage flared in them. Without warning, he sank his teeth into the edge of her lip. Thora hissed through her teeth as the sharp tang of blood flooded her tongue. "Are you a damn animal?" she snarled. Draven pressed his thumb possessively over the bite mark he'd left on her lip, a wild, wicked grin splitting his face. "I told you. You don't get to say no to me." A flash of blue light surged through Thora's eyes. Dense waves of blue ability wave bled from every inch of her body, and the two opposing forces clashed silently in the space between them, shaking the very air in the room. Draven seized her jaw with one hand, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity that refused to let a single emotion hide. His voice came out hard and commanding. "Care about me, Thora. About Draven. Not Darius." Then, abruptly, a low laugh spilled from his throat. His hand drifted to her neck, fingers tracing back and forth across the skin. His voice turned soft and unhurried, but the threat beneath it was unmistakable. "Because if you don't ... I might just have to kill you." The coldness in Thora's gaze sharpened to a razor's edge. Draven was like a person's shadow—a vessel for every dark, twisted emotion—repulsive and yet impossible to simply erase. He was like a child in that way. No inherent sense of good or evil. Every action driven purely by impulse and feeling. But that didn't mean—not for one second—that she would tolerate being assaulted or threatened. "Where is Darius?" Thora asked again, completely ignoring every unhinged word that had just left his mouth. As far as she was concerned, none of it was worth the breath it took to acknowledge. Being dismissed like he didn't exist flipped a switch. Draven's expression turned venomous in an instant, his jaw tight with barely contained rage. The black ability wave erupted—pouring from his body in an uncontrolled torrent, desperate for an outlet. In an instant, every plant in the room withered and died. The fish in the tank went belly-up. Anything with a pulse shriveled and collapsed. Thora caught sight of the lifeless objects in the room beginning to warp and buckle. If this kept going, the consequences would be catastrophic. Her eyes flashed. She channeled her ability, seizing control of the elements in the air. In an instant, several chains of pure, solidified energy materialized out of nothing and locked around Draven's body. "Keep this up, and I will put you down!" Thora's voice cracked through the room like a whip, leaving no space for argument.