Walls cracked from floor to ceiling as the competing energies tore through the building's structure, plaster raining down in sheets, furniture disintegrating in the crossfire.
The bed where Draven and I had slept exploded into splinters. The floorboards buckled, the ritual runes beneath them blazing brighter as the circle fought to complete its work.
"You're destroying the building!" I shouted through the maelstrom.
"I'm destroying the cage they built around me!" Dominic snarled back, shadow magic coiling around his arms. "Every wall reeks of the life you stole: the mate, the pack, the belonging. Let it all burn!"
"I didn't steal anything, Dominic. It was offered to me, and I had the courage to accept it."
"You call it courage?" He laughed, dark and fractured. "You stumbled across a border half-dead and fell into an Alpha's arms. That's luck wearing a prettier name."
He was cunning.
Where I fought with raw power, Dominic fought with precision, reading the currents of my energy through our twin bond, anticipating my strikes before I launched them.
Every barrier I raised, he found the seam where our shared blood created a weakness and drove his shadow magic through it.
"He's using the bond against you," Hyde warned, his voice strained. "Your blood recognizes his. The ritual is exploiting that recognition to pull your power toward the blade."
"How do I stop it?"
"Don't fight the connection. Fight through it."
I pressed harder, silver frost erupting beneath my feet, the crescent mark blazing so bright it threw shadows across the ruined walls.
Dominic matched me stroke for stroke, the shadow-forged blade singing through the air as he channeled his magic through its edge.
Then he struck.
The blade came low and fast. A feint to the left that drew my barrier wide, then a savage reversal that slipped beneath my guard and sliced across my ribs.
The black steel parted my skin, and the wound burned with a sharp, immediate cold designed to sever rather than drain.
My power wavered. The silver light flickered, the cut disrupting the ancestral energy's flow. I staggered, blood seeping between my fingers, and Dominic was on me before I could recover.
He drove his shoulder into my chest, sending me crashing backward into the remnants of the wall. Before I could right myself, his forearm was across my throat, the shadow-forged blade pressed against the skin just below my jaw.
The edge hummed against my pulse, and violet light reflected in Dominic's eyes—wild, triumphant, desperate.
"This is how it ends, brother," he breathed, his face inches from mine. "The prophecy was fulfilled. Everything they said I'd become, everything they were afraid of—they were right all along."
"No," I managed, the blade's pressure making the word cost me. "They were scared and cruel, and they turned their fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're proving them right because you chose to, Dominic. You chose this."
"What choice does the dark twin get?" The words cracked out of him like something breaking under pressure. "They decided what I was before I could walk."
The blade trembled against my throat. His arm shook. Beneath the fury and the shadow magic and the years of calculated cruelty, Dominic Nightshade was shaking.
"Now," Hyde whispered, and his voice was different—layered, resonant, carrying harmonics that didn't belong to a single wolf.
The ancestors were speaking through him, their collective consciousness rising from the depths of the power they'd poured into me at the Hollow Stones.
"Now, Atlas. Not with violence. With truth."
"The balance was never about destruction," I said, and the words came from my mouth but the voices behind them were ancient—dozens of silver wolves speaking in unison through the last vessel of their bloodline.
"It was about choice. Light and dark exist in both of you. The prophecy didn't assign roles. And you can choose differently, Dominic. Right now, in this moment, you can choose."
"Shut up." His voice broke. "You don't get to—"
"I'm not going to kill you."
The words landed in the silence between us like a stone in deep water. Dominic's eyes widened—confusion fracturing the triumph, the blade wavering at my throat.
"What?"
"I'm not going to kill you," I repeated. "That's what they'd want—the parents who broke both of us, the prophecy they twisted to justify it. That's their ending. Not mine."
I reached through the ritual circle with everything I had. The ancestral power followed my intent, flooding down the connection like silver fire through a fuse, and I felt it reach Dominic's blood—
I felt it to find the witch's corruption woven through his veins, the dark magic that Maren had fused into him years ago, the foreign power that had twisted his shadow manipulation from a gift into a weapon.
I burned it out. The silver fire latched onto every thread of stolen magic in Dominic's blood and incinerated it.
The witch's corruption screamed—dark smoke pouring from his skin in writhing tendrils that dissolved in the silver light. The runes on the floor shattered one by one, the ritual circle collapsing as its power source was consumed.
Dominic screamed.
The blade fell from his fingers and clattered to the floor, the black steel cracking down its center as the shadow magic that had forged it died.
His hands clawed at his chest, his back arching, his eyes flooding with violet light that flickered, stuttered, and went dark.
The shadows died. Every tendril, every coil, every trace of the witch's magic that had lived inside my brother for years—all of it burned away in the silver fire until nothing remained but smoke and silence.
My brother collapsed.
He hit the ruined floor on his hands and knees, gasping, shaking violently, his body stripped of every ounce of stolen power.
No shadow magic coiled at his feet. No dark energy pulsed beneath his skin. The obsidian veins that had threaded through his hands were gone, leaving only pale, trembling flesh.
He looked up at me with eyes that were just eyes: dark, human, empty of everything except shock and the raw, devastating vulnerability of a man who'd just lost the only armor he'd ever known.
"What did you do to me?" he whispered, and his voice was small, smaller than I'd ever heard it. The voice of the six-year-old boy who'd heard his mother flinch.
"I gave you the choice our parents never did." I knelt in front of him, blood still seeping from the wound at my ribs, my crescent mark casting silver light across both our faces. "What you do with it is yours."
Dominic stared at me. His lips parted, but no words came. His hands pressed flat against the cracked floor, shaking so badly the tremors were visible from his fingertips to his shoulders, and something in his expression fractured beyond repair.
His head dropped. His shoulders caved inward. And in the smoking ruins of Draven's bedroom, stripped of every stolen power, my twin brother folded into himself and went silent.