Fate So Cruelly Bound (The Deadly Divine #2)

Chapter 1

Elara ran because running was easier than thinking.

Easier than remembering.

They moved in tandem. A whisper of motion through the trees. Driven only forward. This was Turlaith land, Reynnar had said that first night. Deep in the savage wilds of Tír na nóg.

And they were trespassing.

The moss-drenched ground absorbed the thud of Elara’s footsteps, cushioning her flight but never easing the ache in her chest. She barely registered the scrape of branches against her arms or the damp fingers of fog that coiled possessively around her ankles.

It didn’t matter. She’d stopped feeling these things days ago, sealed behind some quiet collapse, untouched by remorse or ruin or the wreckage she’d left behind.

She drew in a ragged breath, the air lush with juniper.

Droplets gathered in her curls, sliding down her neck in gentle trails—a cleansing rain, Reynnar called it.

But Elara felt no absolution in its touch.

It did not wash her clean. It soaked, it seeped, and it clung like a sorrow she could not shed.

She tightened her grip on the Wound of Light, its blade catching flickering shafts of haze-draped sun as they threaded like golden needles through the heavy gloom above.

Talamh na Sí.

The forest had a name like music, resonant, ancient—a sacred place.

But these woods did not welcome her. She felt their resentment in every bramble hooking into her clothes, whispering in rattling leaves and creaking branches, outsider, outsider, outsider, swallowing each hurried step in mud thick as spilled blood.

And when her toe caught on a hidden root, Talamh na Sí exacted its vengeance.

Elara fell hard, the ground rising eagerly to meet her, jolting pain up her knee.

Her necklace—the bloodstone at her throat—throbbed in answer, hot and pulsing as though her heartbeat had fled upward to lodge itself inside the stone.

She sucked in a breath, pressing a palm against her ribs until it found its pace again.

Before she could curse the hateful earth, Reynnar’s callused grip found her arm, pulling her upright. He did not meet her gaze. “Careful,” he said, not unkindly, but not like he used to either.

Elara muttered her thanks, her heart holding his distance in aching silence.

She buried it, alongside everything else she’d lost, and kept running.

Within an hour, the downpour had shifted from mist to needles. Ice slithered beneath her clothes, burrowing like worms under her skin. Somewhere behind them, water coursed over stone—a brook swollen to a roar by three days of unrelenting rain.

In Verdara, the scribes had painted the Sídhe lands as a realm of eternal beauty—gardens that bloomed year-round, skies that shimmered with gold light, cities carved from starstone.

Every book she’d read had echoed the same refrain: paradise, perfected.

But the scholars had never set foot here.

If they had, they might have written about the things with too many eyes in the trees, the flowers that wept blood when picked, or the deep hum beneath the soil that made her molars ache if she stood still too long.

Her boots squelched against the mossy incline as she followed Reynnar through the trees, eyes fixed on the faint depressions left in riverbeds—trails barely there, half-lost beneath running water.

Aoife’s tracks—a looped twig, a scraped line in bark, the faintest ruffle in fern fronds where a boot had slipped and caught itself mid-fall.

Patterns, her mind offered, grateful for something it could parse.

But it was not just Aoife’s—there were hundreds more, Sídhe still fleeing the nightmare they’d endured in the Pit.

Reynnar lifted two fingers—halt.

Elara stopped, one palm open to steady her weight against an old birch whose bark peeled away like pages.

He bent to examine a shallow impression in the loam.

His hair—black as a crow’s wing—fell forward, and she remembered, unwanted, how it had fallen against her cheek that first night he’d held her while she shook.

“There,” he said softly. “A change in pace. They quickened.”

Elara saw it too: the stride lengthening, the toe digging deeper. “Someone heard something,” she said. “Or imagined it.”

“It is rarely imagination here.”

His glance flicked to the trail. The Turlaith favored deadfall traps in the hollows and ring snares where the understory thickened; near ridgebacks, they left prayer knots in the branches, plaited out of rush and horsehair, to warn their own.

She counted three in as many minutes. Warnings, layered as if for a storm.

“They’ve sewn a border.”

He hummed in agreement.

“Why would Aoife take a path like this, knowing it’s marked?”

Reynnar’s expression shifted, a shadow passing across his features—the same shadow she’d seen the very first time she’d asked that question.

“Aoife is smart,” he finally said. “A gifted tracker, a disciplined soldier, a born leader. She must have her reasons—and we’ll understand when we catch up to them. I’m sure of it.”

She nodded once, clinging to the hope his conviction might hold true, and he straightened.

“We take the ridge path,” he decided.

They moved as one. Tension rippled beneath Reynnar’s soaked tunic, a wary stillness seizing him each time the forest rustled or sighed. His knuckles paled around the hilts of the swords he’d claimed in blood back in the Pit—the only remnants he’d managed to carry through the gate into his world.

Elara studied his taut shoulders, the careful distance he kept between them, and that tender fracture widened inside her.

The Draoth Cara thrummed in him like a resonant string.

For the briefest moment, that link had vibrated between them, a secret line through the dark.

Now, her half of it felt frayed, unreliable. Her fault. His. Both.

It hadn’t been like this when they woke.

She could still feel the rough stone beneath her back, etched lines pulsing faintly with warmth. She’d woken gasping, choking on air thick with life, and Reynnar had been there, curled protectively around her inside the Aelfhenge.

She hadn’t thought—that was the problem.

No caution, no planning, just a rush of blood and a single, blinding impulse: Get back.

To Ivan—to the others. Before it was too late.

The dagger had lain beside her as if it belonged there—the Wound of Light, still faintly warm, whispering softly against her palm like a promise. The weave of the veil had been thin near the henge; she’d felt it, like tugging at a loose thread. One cut was all it would take.

Reynnar had woken without her noticing. He’d caught her wrist before she could drive the blade down, his grip fierce and desperate. “If you open that gate,” he’d said, voice trembling with fury, “you open it for him too—for all of them.”

She hadn’t listened. Not at first. Had shouted, shoved, fought like her lungs might collapse from the pressure of her own panic. Ivan needed her. They all needed her. She couldn’t just leave them behind.

“We’ll go back for them,” Reynnar had promised, tightening his grip on her wrist until the urgency of his words pierced through her.

“I swear it, Eilíara. But now is not the time. We need to regroup—not rush blindly back in and hand the human king another chance. You have the dagger. He can’t reach us here. Now is the time to plan.”

Eventually, she’d relented. Dropped the blade. Sank to the forest floor and wept into her muddy palms while Reynnar pulled her into his arms, holding her in silence.

That was days ago. He hadn’t spoken much since. Only measured answers when she asked or careful gestures when she needed direction. As though something fragile, something vital had cracked between them.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Was he ashamed of her?

Because she was.

Ashamed that her first thought hadn’t been for this sacred, wounded world or the Sídhe whose blood had opened it—but for him.

Ashamed she’d risked everything in a selfish attempt to reach backward through the gate and grasp Ivan’s hand, to drag the past forward, clinging like a coward to something that was never meant to be.

Elara set her jaw, blinking rapidly until the sting behind her eyes receded. The path ahead narrowed, thick with briar. She pressed on, ducking beneath an arch of green-lit thorns.

“Be on your guard. We’re getting close.”

She slowed, her breath leaving in a rush; it took effort to drag the next one in.

“How can you tell?”

He dropped into a crouch and brushed aside a veil of ferns, sifting through the scattered leaf litter. “Look,” he said, gesturing her closer. Tracks—heavy boots cutting deep into the damp earth, all moving north. Then, a short distance on, another trail broke away east—lighter, faster, uneven.

“The tracks split,” Elara murmured.

“Yes,” Reynnar said. He rose and stepped toward a nearby tree. Beneath the lichen, barely visible unless you knew to look, three shallow marks had been cut into the bark.

“Aoife,” she breathed.

“She used to carve them when we were children,” Reynnar said. “Back home. In the high passes. So I wouldn’t lose her.”

Elara frowned, studying the mark. “Was she separated from the others—or taken?”

Reynnar’s gaze shifted east, toward the darker path where the forest seemed to narrow. “I don’t believe so, no.”

“How can you tell?”

He studied the mark again, longer this time.

“This was left for me.” A pause. A slow, measured breath.

“If Aoife were in danger, the mark would be different. This is an invitation.” He straightened, gaze cutting to Elara.

“She’s heading toward contested ground. We’re already in enemy territory.

She’s going straight through the heart of it. ”

The words sank deep and refused to move.