Chapter 222: I do as I please.

Della’s POV

I sat at the edge of the mountain again, staring down at the burning world below me.

Almost everyone was dead by now. Every single wolf who had once called earth home was either dead or running out of places to hide. Moonfire had spread into every corner, devouring everything in its path, and even if it hadn’t, I would have found a way to spread it further.

There was no point pretending otherwise. I wanted this world gone.

Below me, two figures were locked in battle, their movements fast enough that an ordinary wolf would have struggled to follow them. Malachi had finally encountered Katherine, and from the looks of it, neither of them intended for the other to walk away alive.

They were trying to kill each other.

I watched for a while, resting my chin on my hand. It was obvious who would win, though I wasn’t sure either of them cared anymore. Katherine had spent so long trying to destroy everything that had ever hurt her, and Malachi had finally reached the point where he was willing to lose everything for a woman who no longer wanted him.

How unfortunate.

I turned my eyes away from them and looked at the burning horizon.

Once, I had been afraid of this very thing. I remembered sitting in a small cottage with Annelise, listening to the firewood crackle beneath a hanging pot while she stirred a pot of soup that barely had enough seasoning to deserve the name. I had been worried about what would happen if the wolves found us, whether we could keep running, and how much longer Malachi’s guards could hold them back.

But more than anything, I had been afraid for Annelise.

I knew what the wolves would do to her if they discovered she had helped me. They would call her a traitor, strip away everything she had, and perhaps kill her simply for standing beside someone they had already decided deserved to die.

I remembered looking at her and asking her to leave me behind.

‘You could make up a story, I’d told her. You could say I forced you to help me. They would believe you over me.’

I’d thought I was being kind. I thought giving her a chance to save herself was the least I could do after dragging her into this mess.

Annelise had looked at me as though I’d said something stupid.

‘I didn’t follow you because you forced me. I walked with you because I chose to.’

At the time, I hadn’t understood how someone could say that so easily when the consequences could be death. She had a home, a mother, a life she could return to. She could have left me behind and gone back to everything she knew. But she stayed.

‘Don’t ever be so afraid of dying that you forget how to live.’

I closed my eyes briefly, and I started to wonder what she would say if she could see me now.

Would she still tell me I wasn’t a tragedy? Would she still ask me to change what I thought of myself if I couldn’t change what the world thought of me?

Or would she look at the burning realm and finally admit that I had become exactly what everyone had always claimed I was? A monster.

The word no longer bothered me.

Perhaps that was the most frightening part of everything. There had been a time when I would have spent hours wondering whether I was a good person, and whether I deserved the way I was treated.

I had searched for answers in every insult, every abuse and every beating. I had wondered what I needed to change to make them love me, and how much more I needed to endure before someone finally decided I had suffered enough.

I had wanted a family. I had wanted to be loved. I had wanted someone to look at me and see more than a Rotblood.

I had wanted so many things, and then I lost them one by one.

My father had helped destroy me. My stepmother had watched me suffer and added to it. My siblings had made my life unbearable, and the sister I once trusted had stabbed me in the back after years of pretending to be the only person who stood beside me.

I had lost my child before I could hold it. I had lost Liam, and Annelise, who had chosen to stand beside me when she had every reason to run. I had lost people who had never deserved to die, and I had watched the world continue as though none of it mattered.

And of course, let’s not forget about Malachi.

He had been the man who was supposed to protect me, my mate, the person who should have made the world feel less cruel. Instead, he had made me question whether I deserved to be protected at all.

He had hurt me, rejected me, and allowed his hatred for another woman to become another cage around my life.

Now he was down there fighting that same woman, and I was sitting on a mountain simply watching them because their lives had nothing to do with me.

Annelise had also said that if death came for her because she stood beside me, she would meet it standing. She had believed in her choices, even when those choices led her somewhere she couldn’t return from.

I had spent so long wishing someone would choose me that I had never considered what I would do when I finally had the power to choose what happened to everyone else.

Now I knew.

I had chosen revenge over forgiveness. I had chosen to make the people who hurt me understand what helplessness felt like. I had chosen to destroy the lives they had built on my suffering, to take away their power, their pride, and every excuse they had used to justify what they did to me.

And somewhere along the way, I had stopped caring where the punishment ended.

I had ruined Beatrice’s life long before I revealed myself to her. I had watched her question her own sanity, watched her cling to the possibility that I might still be alive, and allowed her fear to grow until she could no longer distinguish what was real from what she imagined. I had taken everything she thought she had won and turned it against her.

I had done the same to Jaime, Evangeline, and Augustus. I had stripped them of the things they valued most and brought them together at Blackwater Keep, where they could finally look at one another and see what remained of their family.

I had tortured Selene because she had helped destroy my life. I had made others pay for the things they had done, and some had died before I could finish with them. I could still hear their screams if I allowed myself to remember them.

But I didn’t feel the need to.

The wolves had called me cursed and all that had been built on lies. They had treated me as though I were less than them, then acted surprised when I stopped caring about their suffering.

They had spent generations mistreating Rotbloods, blaming us for things we had never done, and teaching their children to despise us before they were old enough to understand why.

Now they were learning what it meant to live in a world where something they feared had no reason to spare them.

They had paid the ultimate price for their arrogance!

A burst of Moonfire rose from the valley below, swallowing the remains of a building. I watched until the structure collapsed, sending sparks into the air.

There was no satisfaction in the sight anymore. Not the kind I had expected, anyway. I had imagined that destroying everything would make the pain quieter, that watching the world burn would somehow balance the scales.

But the dead remained dead. My child was still gone. Annelise wasn’t coming back, and no amount of suffering I inflicted on the wolves could change that.

Revenge had given me something to do with my pain. It had given me a reason to wake up every day and a direction for all the hatred I had carried for so long.

It had not given me back the things I had lost.

I knew that, and I simply no longer cared enough to stop.

Perhaps that was what Annelise had meant when she told me to live because I chose to, not because I wanted to prove someone wrong. I had survived because I wanted to live, and now I was living exactly as I wanted.

Whether she would have approved was a different question, and I wasn’t going to bother myself about it because there was no remnants of the old me anymore.

Malachi had made his choice when he left everything behind to follow me. Katherine had made hers long before she stole Moonfire and decided the entire wolf species deserved to die. And I had made mine when I stopped looking for a reason to forgive the world.

We were all living with the consequences now.

I rose from the edge of the mountain, brushing the dust from my clothes. The wind swept across my face, carrying the smell of smoke and ash from the burning realm below.

The world was ending, and I had helped bring it here.

I could have stopped. I could have turned away from the fire and tried to save whoever remained. I could have searched for survivors, offered them shelter, and given the wolves one last chance to become something better than what they had been.

But that would have required me to believe they could change, and I no longer believed it was my responsibility to find out.

I looked once more at the burning horizon.

Annelise had told me I wasn’t a tragedy. She had wanted me to understand that what happened to me did not define who I was, that I could choose to live without letting the world decide my worth.

She had been right.

What happened to me didn’t decide what I became.

I did.

And perhaps that was the truth no one wanted to face. I hadn’t been born wanting to destroy the world. I hadn’t awakened with a desire to watch innocent people die. I had once been a girl who wanted to be loved, who feared death, who begged for someone to stay.

I remembered her, and I simply wasn’t her anymore.

Asteria stirred inside of me and asked, *What happens now?*

I looked toward the mountains beyond the burning valley. I looked at what little was left that was about to be turned into ashes too, and replied, *Now, we keep doing as we please,*

Then I walked on, leaving the burning world behind me and headed back to Blackwater Keep. It had taken everything from me.

In the end, the favour had been returned.

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THE END.

I’m so glad we finally came to the end of this book, and I genuinely appreciate everyone who followed through till we got here. Thank you so much!

In my few years of writing, Della’s character is the only one that broke me this much. I cried while imagining so many scenes, while writing it, and while building her character till she became who she is now.

I hope you guys cried too ~ Hehe.

Thank you again for journeying with me.

I recommend my other books, and oh, don’t worry, they aren’t as bad as this one.