Chapter 206: Chapter 206: The Banishment

“TAKE HER. Take the girl. Just give me the silence back. Make the burning stop.”

Seryn paused, her eyes narrowing. She was a creature of the Third Circle—suspicion was her nature. But the sight of Grayson, his obsidian eyes wide and vacant, his body trembling with the strain of his hunger, was a lure she couldn’t ignore. She wanted the Ashford heir broken, and here he was, offering her the girl on a silver platter.

“You’d trade her?” Seryn purred, stepping into the circle Lucson had carved.

“I’d trade the world,” Grayson rasped, his voice a beautiful, ruined wreckage.

Seryn laughed and reached for Mailah’s arm.

“Now!” Grayson’s voice didn’t just scream; it detonated.

He didn’t retreat. He exploded forward with a brutality that left Mailah breathless. He slammed into Seryn, the sound of the impact echoing like thunder against the concrete. He pinned her to the pillar, his hands clamping around her wrists with bone-crushing force.

Lucson and Carson moved in perfect synchronization. Lucson slammed his palms to the floor, and the silver sigils ignited, a cage of holy light trapping the two demons. Seryn shrieked, a sound of jagged glass and dying stars. She lashed out, her shadow-whip tearing through Grayson’s shoulder. Blood welled up, but he didn’t even blink. He leaned into her, his teeth baring in a savage snarl.

“You wanted the beast, Seryn,” he hissed, his voice shaking the very floor. “Here he is.”

With a roar of effort, he wrenched her arm back. He drew the silver dagger and sliced. One glowing drop of royalty fell.

“Got it!” Carson shouted, catching the blood in the vial. “Twelve minutes! Move!”

But Seryn’s fury was a physical force. She erupted into a cloud of darkness so dense it shattered Lucson’s sigils like glass. The cage vanished in a spray of white sparks.

“Run!” Lucson commanded, grabbing Mailah and hauling her toward the car.

They tore out of the garage, the tires screaming. In the back seat, Grayson sat perfectly still. He was bleeding, his eyes still a terrifying, vacant black. When he looked at Mailah, there was a flash of something—a brief, agonizing flicker of the man who loved her—before the beast slammed the door shut again.

“We have to get back,” Grayson said, his voice flat and cold. “Before midnight.”

They burst into Ysoria’s office at 11:58 PM. The witch didn’t look up from the vial Carson set on her desk. She held it to the light, the blood pulsing like a dying heart.

“Punctual,” she noted, her voice terrifyingly placid. She kicked aside the rug to reveal the runic map of the city. “Grayson. The price.”

Mailah felt the world tilt. “What is it?”

Ysoria’s matte-black eyes fixed on Grayson. “I don’t want your soul, Grayson Ashford. I want your memory of her. Every touch, every kiss, every moment of love. I want to harvest it. You will save her… but you will never remember why.”

The silence was absolute. Mailah felt the air leave the room.

Grayson turned to Mailah. He looked at her—not with the warmth of a fiancé, but with the intense, simmering hunger of a predator about to lose his most precious kill. He looked at the bruises on her neck, his eyes darkening as he committed the sight of her to a memory that was already slipping away.

“Grayson, no,” Mailah whispered, tears blurring her vision. “Don’t do it.”

Grayson didn’t hesitate. He looked at Ysoria, his obsidian eyes steady and cold. “Do it.”

The air in the office didn’t just grow cold; it ceased to be air at all. It became a pressurized vacuum, a weight that pulled at the marrow of Mailah’s bones.

The office felt like a pressurized chamber as Ysoria stood up, smoothing the front of her charcoal suit. She picked up the vial of blood with the casualness of a woman holding a latte, but the air around her began to hum with a low, dissonant vibration.

“The parking lot,” Ysoria commanded, her voice cutting through the tension like a scalpel. “The geometry of this building is a lightning rod for the ley lines, but the anchor must be set where the blood was spilled. If we don’t finish this by midnight, the symmetry breaks, and I stop caring about your survival.”

They descended in the elevator in a suffocating silence. Grayson stood near the doors, his back to Mailah. He looked like a statue of jagged obsidian, his shoulders rigid, his presence so cold it made the small space feel like a tomb.

When the doors hissed open to the lower level, the scene was a nightmare in grayscale. Seryn was no longer a woman; she was a churning mass of sentient darkness, hammering against the invisible barriers Ysoria had likely placed the moment they stepped into the building. The sound was a rhythmic, wet thudding, punctuated by the Princess’s muffled shrieks of fury.

Grayson stopped at the edge of the kill zone. He turned to Mailah then, and for a fleeting second, the terrifying predator vanished, replaced by the man who had held her in the furs of the bunker.

“Mailah,” he said, his voice a low, melodic ache. He stepped into her space, his hands coming up to cup her face. His touch was bruisingly firm, his thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones as if he were trying to memorize the texture of her skin through his fingertips. “Look at me.”

Mailah looked, her eyes swimming with tears. “Grayson, please. We can fight her. We can run again.”

“No,” he rasped, his eyes swirling with a final, desperate heat. “She will never stop. She will hunt you to the ends of the earth just to get to me, and I will eventually fail you. This is the only way to make her disappear. The only way you get to live.”

“But at what cost?” she choked out. “You won’t know me. You won’t remember us.”

Grayson leaned down, his forehead dropping against hers. He inhaled sharply, dragging the scent of her deep into his lungs. “Then you’ll have to be the one who remembers. Be my anchor from the outside, even if I don’t know why I’m drifting.”

He kissed her then, a hard, desperate collision of teeth and tongue that tasted of salt and an impending ending. It was a goodbye disguised as a claim. He pulled away, his expression hardening into a cold, stony mask. “Don’t look away,” he commanded.

He turned and walked toward Ysoria.

The witch was standing in the center of the concrete floor, her designer heels planted firmly amidst the oil stains and tire marks. She poured the blood onto the ground. Instead of spreading, the blood began to glow with a sickly neon light, crawling outward to form a massive, shimmering sigil that mirrored the street map of Zurich.

“Stay back!” Ysoria warned the others. She raised her hands, and the shadows of the parking garage suddenly snapped toward the center.

Seryn’s mass was dragged, howling, into the glowing circle. The Princess tried to lash out, but Ysoria simply flicked her wrist, and the air around Seryn solidified into a translucent, shimmering cage of iron-enriched energy.

“Grayson Ashford,” Ysoria intoned, her matte-black eyes bleeding white light. “Step into the center. Give me the bridge. Give me the memory.”

Grayson stepped into the light. The moment he crossed the threshold, his body arched back, his mouth opening in a silent scream.

Mailah watched in horror as the shimmering, ethereal smoke began to rise from his skin. It wasn’t just smoke—it was them. She saw a wisp of silver that carried the sound of their first dance. She saw a thread of gold that pulsed with the heat of the kiss he had given her.

Ysoria reached out, her fingers plucking the threads from the air like a weaver at a loom. With every thread she pulled, the light around Seryn grew more intense, more crushing. The Princess was being erased, her essence being used as the fuel for her own banishment.

“I take the fire,” Ysoria chanted, her voice echoing off the concrete. “I take the light. I take the name that kept the beast at bay.”

A final, brilliant strand of light—the color of a summer sunset—tore away from Grayson’s chest. It was the memory of the previous night. The passion, the surrender, the marks on her neck.

Grayson collapsed to his knees, his head hanging low.

The light imploded. A shockwave of cold air hit Mailah, knocking her back against a pillar. When the spots cleared from her eyes, Seryn was gone. The parking lot was silent, save for the hum of the overhead lights.

Ysoria stood there, holding a small, glowing gemstone. She tucked it into her pocket with a satisfied nod. “Banishment complete. Symmetry restored.”

Mailah scrambled to her feet, her heart in her throat. “Grayson!”

She ran to him, dropping to her knees and reaching for his shoulders. “Grayson, are you okay? It’s over. She’s gone. We’re safe.”

Grayson slowly lifted his head.

Mailah froze. The obsidian was gone. His eyes were a flat, cold gray—the color of a winter sky over a frozen lake. He looked at her hand on his arm, and then he looked at her face.

There was no recognition. No simmering hunger. No protective warmth.

He looked at her with the chilling, aristocratic detachment of a high-tier demon looking at a stray human who had dared to touch his coat. He stood up, shaking her hand off as if it were an annoying insect.

“Lucson,” Grayson said, his voice melodic but utterly devoid of the metallic rasp that had loved her. He didn’t even look back at Mailah as he straightened his torn shirt. “Who is this human?”

The coldness in his voice was a physical blow. Mailah felt the air leave her lungs.

“Grayson…” she whispered, her voice breaking. “It’s me. It’s Mailah.”

He tilted his head, his gray eyes sweeping over her with a clinical curiosity. He paused at the bruises on her neck—the ones he had made with such possessive fervor only hours ago. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t blush. He simply pointed to them with a gloved finger.

“You have been marked by an Ashford signature,” he noted, his tone flat. “Lucson, if this is one of Carson’s ’pets’ that got caught in the crossfire, see that she is compensated and returned to the city.”

He walked past her then, his stride long and purposeful, his presence as cold and unreachable as a star. He didn’t look back. He didn’t care.

Mailah stood alone in the center of the dark parking lot, the marks on her skin still burning, while the man who had almost died to save her walked away without knowing her name.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep