Chapter 20 Hera’s Blessing
Hera's Blessing
Cora
Back in my second year of botany, Theo had taken us to the edge of the campus grounds to show us a black walnut tree. It was magnificent, a towering giant of dark bark and sweeping branches that commanded the landscape.
But nothing grew beneath it. Its roots released chemicals that choked out competition, and its taproot was strong enough to crack concrete foundations. It didn’t mean to destroy. It simply required everything to survive.
The bond felt like that tree.
It was a majestic, living thing that had taken root in the soil of my chest, its presence a suffocating, exhausting weight. I loved it from the moment I sensed it, but at the same time, I knew it could easily crush me.
So much had happened between Damon and me. Our connection had been forged by instinct and circumstance, by an attraction I hadn’t understood myself. I’d chosen him in the end. I’d believed that he’d choose me, too. But I hadn’t expected how that choice would make me feel.
Damon and I lay together, side by side, a still point in the aftermath of a hurricane.
The silence between us stretched, thick and heavy with everything that had just passed.
Through the new, thrumming root system in my chest, I could feel the state of him.
It was a vibrating tension, like a thousand tightly wound steel cables holding back an ocean of pure, annihilating chaos.
I couldn’t stay silent anymore. I was still carrying the traces of his ownership on my skin, but the claiming process had been hard on him, too. “Damon?”
He didn’t move, but a low grunt from deep in his chest confirmed he’d heard me.
“Are you... alright?”
“Fine,” he bit out, the word clipped and dismissive, a reflexive shield.
It was a lie. A blatant, obvious lie. For the first time, I knew it with a certainty that was absolute and had nothing to do with observation.
The bond screamed the truth his mouth wouldn’t speak.
A wave of his hollowed-out exhaustion washed over me through our connection.
It was the feeling of a fortress whose walls were still standing, but whose garrison had been bled dry to the last man.
“Don’t lie to me,” I murmured, turning my head on the cold stone to face him. “Not anymore. I can... feel it.”
His eyes finally opened, black and fathomless, and fixed on mine. He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t. Through the bond, I sent a thought, a fragile, awed whisper into the new, shared space between us.
The darkness. During the claiming. It was reaching for me. The void... you held it back.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. For a moment, I felt a flash of what he’d experienced—a sensation of absolute, devouring cold, the horrifying emptiness of a grave that wanted to snuff out the warmth of my blood.
He pushed himself upright, his movements stiff with a pain he refused to acknowledge.
His response came back through the link, not as words, but as a pure, undiluted concept.
It was a wall of bedrock, the unshakeable, primal law of his being.
Letting it have you was not an option.
The absolute nature of his protectiveness was just as demanding and all-consuming as the physical bond itself. I was bound not just to a man, but to the crushing weight of his victory. And I wanted nothing more than to crawl into his arms and lay there forever.
“You did it,” a calm voice said, cutting through our private world. “I admit, I had my doubts.”
Helena Winters stood at the edge of the platform, her expression one of genuine, maternal pride. “But look at you both now. Still here, still together. Alive. I couldn’t be prouder.”
Her lavender perfume cut through the metallic tang of blood and power, a clean, calming presence in the aftermath. Her gaze was soft as she took in our state.
Damon managed to lift his head enough to meet her eyes. “We couldn’t have done it without your support, Helena. I mean that.”
“Nonsense. You both have more strength than you realize.” She moved closer, kneeling beside me, and her expression sobered into one of clinical focus. “But that being said… How are you feeling? Really feeling.”
I groaned, not even bothering to hide the profound weariness that had settled in my bones. “Sore. Like I’ve been turned inside out and put back together wrong. But... relieved. Like we actually won.”
“The bond is strong,” Damon added, a note of grim pride in his tone. “Stronger than I’d hoped.”
Helena nodded, but a flicker of uncertainty swept over her face as she studied the dark, angry-looking mark on my throat. “It is strong, Damon. That’s what worries me.”
The relief I’d been feeling started to curdle in my stomach like soured milk. “What do you mean?”
“The stress of a forced claiming... it can create inconsistencies,” she said carefully, her words chosen with a healer’s precision.
“Your bond is trying to reconcile two opposing forces—the life of Demeter and the void of Hades. It’s doing so by drawing on the only fuel source it has.
” She met my eyes, her gaze full of a pity that terrified me more than any threat. “You.”
Damon was suddenly more alert, his protective instincts stirring like a beast from its slumber. “Are you saying it’s poisoning her, like the temporary bite did?”
“No, nothing that dramatic,” Helena reassured him, though her eyes never left me. “It’s more like a slow starvation. It’s pulling the strength right out of your bones, isn’t it, Cora? A fire with no fuel, burning you away.”
Her words were a perfect echo of my own thoughts, and the validation sent a chill down my spine. “Yes,” I whispered. “That’s exactly it.”
“If this continues,” Helena said, her voice dropping to a grave whisper that seemed to suck the air from the amphitheater, “the exhaustion you are feeling could become… permanent.”
Permanent. Pure terror rushed through me, stronger than ever before. I saw a future of perpetual twilight, of a mind too tired to think. I would be a plant in salted earth, forever chained to this beautiful, ravenous thing that was drinking me into nothingness. “What can we do?”
“A Blessing of Hera,” she said, her confidence a force of nature in itself. “It will give the bond a foundation, teach it how to draw from the world around it instead of just from you.”
A way to tame the wild walnut tree. If anyone could do it, it was House Hera. They were the guardians and protectors of marriage, a duty they’d inherited from their patron goddess. Even before having a real connection to the Olympian Houses, I’d heard about their legendary blessings.
I looked at Damon. Through the bond, I could feel the war inside him.
It was the possessive Alpha—snarling at the thought of another’s magic touching his claim—against the desperate protector who would do anything to save me.
He saw me looking, and the protector won.
He turned his head to Helena, his voice a low, guttural command.
“Her safety is all that matters,” he growled. “Do it. And… Thank you.”
Helena’s gaze softened with genuine affection. “You’ve both earned this. After everything you’ve survived... It’d be my honor to help you protect it.”
The tension in my chest released in a single, shuddering breath. Helena placed one hand on my forehead and the other on Damon’s. “This might feel a bit intense at first. But don’t worry. It’s perfectly normal.”
I gave her a small, trembling nod. “I understand.”
A pressure, steady and sure as a mountain, settled over my heart.
I closed my eyes, letting the energy flow through me.
It wasn’t a fire, but a deep, grounding warmth, tracing the new pathways of our bond.
It felt like coming home to a place I’d never known existed, a quiet harbor after a lifetime at sea.
“This binds what is separate,” Helena said, her voice washing over me like a warm tide. “This stabilizes what is joined.”
The energy built slowly, carefully. From beyond his deep contentment, I felt his exhausted relief that we were finally, truly safe. For the first time, a seedling of hope began to sprout, one the weight of the bond couldn’t suffocate.
And then the world tore in half.
It was more than a physical feeling. A violent, metaphysical rip, like the soundless shriek of a soul being torn from its moorings. The root system in my chest was torn away, the brutality leaving a gaping, hollow void behind.
The thread connecting me to him was pulled unbearably taut, and then snapped. One moment, he was there, a solid weight in my soul. The next, nothing. A clean, perfect, agonizing amputation.
A scream built in my throat, a pressure of absolute, crushing horror, but it never found a voice. At the exact moment of the attack, another wave of Helena’s power washed over me.
It was a cool, numbing balm, a syrupy, artificial calm that flooded my system like an injection. It didn’t heal the gaping wound. It just told my body the wound didn’t exist. It was a magical lie, pumped directly into my nerve endings.
My soul cried that a part of me had just been murdered.
Helena’s magic whispered that I had never felt more at peace.
It’s gone. No, it can’t be gone. I feel…
calm. But it’s gone. My body is lying to me.
Or my soul is. Which is real? The signal—from my brain to my limbs, to my lungs, to my voice—got lost in the static between the roaring void and the placid lie.
The contradiction was a system overload, a short-circuit that left me completely frozen.
In front of me, Damon made a sound that was not human. A raw, guttural cry of pure agony. Before, I would have felt the pain behind it. Now, it was just a sound, alien and terrifying, the noise of an animal caught in a trap.
I forced my eyes open. My body was a prison of false peace, but my gaze was my own. I saw him staggering away from me on the platform, clutching his chest, a man being ripped apart from the inside out.
Shadows exploded from him in a maddened rush. It was the same darkness from the claiming, but this time it was wild. No, absolutely feral. The iron will that had held the void at bay was gone, leaving behind a raw, mindless eruption of a soul that had lost its center.
“What did you do?” I shrieked, forcing the words past my numb lips. “Helena, what did you do to him?”
She leaned closer, her voice a calm poison in my ear, devoid of all its previous warmth. “I’m sorry, dear one. But some things are just more important than others.”
The words didn’t register as a betrayal at first. They were just sounds, meaningless against the backdrop of Damon’s agony and the numbness that was being pumped into my veins.
Then, amidst the chaos, another sound broke through the fog of my paralysis. Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, and utterly unhurried.
Alexander Stormwright emerged from the House Zeus seating area, stepping into the circle of calm where I lay frozen. He wasn’t rushing. He wasn’t alarmed. He was simply arriving.
His face was not a mask of victory. It was the cool, dispassionate face of an architect inspecting a completed project. He stopped beside Helena, his gaze sweeping with a flicker of distaste over Damon’s writhing, feral form.
“Thank you, Helena,” he said, his voice smooth and proprietary. “It’s done?”
“The bond is severed,” she confirmed, her tone as clinical as his. “She belongs to him no longer.”
The clinical nature of their exchange, the sheer businesslike finality of it, sent a fresh wave of nausea through me. This wasn’t a crime of passion. It was a transaction. A premeditated execution of something I hadn’t even had a chance to name. “You… All this time. Even this… Because of you.”
Alexander’s storm-gray eyes finally met mine.
“I wouldn’t say that. Plan A was for you to come to us willingly, Dr. Ellis.
When that failed, we had no choice but to improvise.
” His lips twisted into a smile that, for once, held no warmth.
“But make no mistake. This is not because of me. It is still because of you.”
Was it? What was I thinking? Of course it was. Alexander had targeted Theo because of my work. Damon was an impossibly powerful leader of an Olympian House, but that didn’t make him immune to Alexander’s plotting. If anything, the opposite was the case.
As if echoing my thoughts, Damon released another agonized cry. Helena squeezed my shoulder. Her face crumpled slightly, but her abilities never wavered. “I’m sorry, Cora. I wish there had been another way.”
“There’s always another way! Helena, what could possibly be worth this?”
She didn’t answer. Around us, Damon’s shadow abilities were consuming the amphitheater. His protective instincts turned his love for me into a weapon against himself.
Darkness poured from him like blood from a mortal wound. The complete loss of our bond had stripped away his ability to control his volatile powers. Every shadow in the area answered his desperate need to protect me from a threat he couldn’t fight.
Alexander turned away, raising his voice to the watching, terrified Council members. “The Alpha of House Hades has lost control! His power is a danger to us all! We must contain him.”
My hands started shaking first, then my whole body. The artificial peace Helena had wrapped around my soul was a thin blanket over a gaping wound, and the horror was beginning to bleed through.
I tasted bile on my tongue. She had weaponized his trust against us both.
She had used my hope as her scalpel. The cruelest part was knowing she genuinely believed she was doing the right thing.
I watched the woman who had destroyed my life play the role of my savior, and I understood.
Whatever promise she’d made to Alexander, it mattered more than my happiness, more than Damon’s sanity, more than the fragile, beautiful thing we had just built.
From my prison of false peace, I watched the world move. Marcus Dred stepped forward, a wide, predatory grin spreading across his face. “About time someone put this dog on a leash.”
The two House Artemis guards drew their silver bows, arrows of humming light aimed at the heart of the storm. “On the Council’s authority, stand down, Blackwood!”
They were going to tear him apart. And I could only watch, trapped in a lie of perfect, unnatural calm as the cage closed.
I had nothing left. No bond, no trust, no hope. Just the crushing weight of complete betrayal and the terrible knowledge that I was utterly powerless to stop any of it.