My Sister Stole My Mate And I Let Her (Seraphina) novel Chapter 509

Chapter 509: Chapter 509 THE THIRD WRONG THING

SERAPHINA’S POV

We—Kieran, Tobias, Evelyn, my mother, and I—emerged through the treeline in a staggered formation.

The explosion still echoed inside my head.

Every muscle in my body felt tight with residual adrenaline, my nerves stretched raw from the collapse of the chamber and the sight of Catherine vanishing into the heart of her own detonation, just like Marcus had.

Part of me kept expecting her to reappear. Catherine had survived too much, manipulated too much, to disappear so neatly and absolutely.

The uncertainty sat like a stone lodged in my throat, refusing to settle.

Beside me, Kieran was no better. His shoulders remained rigid, his eyes constantly sweeping the terrain ahead, every instinct braced for another attack.

The mate bond carried the edge of his vigilance into me, a steady current of readiness pulsing beneath the exhaustion we both felt.

Evelyn hovered beside Tobias, her expression pinched and tense as she scanned the surrounding battlefield.

Tobias had insisted on carrying my mother himself.

She slumped unconscious in his arms, her breaths shallow but steady, and after everything that had happened below, neither Kieran nor I protested.

We didn’t yet know what Catherine’s disappearance meant for her stolen power and survival, but we had to put that on the back burner for now.

If we encountered resistance on the surface, we needed our hands free. We needed to be able to fight immediately.

But—

The surface felt wrong.

It was quieter in an unsettling way, as if the world had been turned out of its proper alignment and hastily pressed back into place without anyone checking if it fit.

First of all, the eclipse was gone.

The sun hung fully restored above the island, its light so absolute it felt almost unnatural after everything we had endured in the darkness. It illuminated everything with a brutal honesty that left nowhere for shadows to hide.

For a moment, I wondered if I had imagined the entire descent into Catherine’s domain, if the world had simply split and reformed while I was still inside it.

But then I saw the second wrong thing: the battlefield.

Puppets lay scattered across the ridge and down into the clearing like discarded marionettes, limbs slack, weapons slipping from open fingers.

The rogues who had been fighting under Catherine’s influence had been affected too—just differently.

Some blinked into the light as if they had just been born into it.

Others were frozen mid-motion, weapons halted mid-air, as though their bodies had forgotten why they had been moving at all.

A few had dropped to their knees, clutching their heads, gasping like drowning men yanked back to air too quickly.

The silence was not peaceful.

It was disorienting. Unnatural. Like the aftermath of a scream so loud the world had not yet remembered how to continue.

This wasn’t just aftermath; it was severance. A system that had stopped functioning because the thing sustaining it had been removed entirely.

My mind went back to the chamber—to the way Catherine laughed like the world was still hers to command.

The implication formed in my chest like ice spreading through water.

If Catherine’s control had been what sustained this battlefield, then Catherine’s disappearance was not just an escape.

It had been a collapse of her entire structure.

But that didn’t ease the tightness in my chest.

Because Catherine did not do anything without intention.

Even disappearance could be a weapon in her hands.

A cold wind moved through the ridge, carrying the scent of disturbed earth and distant smoke.

Somewhere far below, the ocean continued its rhythm, indifferent to the fact that something foundational had just broken in the world above it.

First things first, we had to—

Movement exploded from the right side of my vision.

Fast. Direct. Unhesitating.

Lucian.

There was no warning in his expression, no hesitation. His eyes were locked on me with a focus and intent that did not belong to the man I had seen earlier.

The third wrong thing.

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