Chapter 5 #2
“Let me save you the trouble.” He stands and rounds the desk.
“The binding does not care which dimension you are in. Distance still causes pain. Disobedience still triggers backlash.” He stops in front of my chair, looming.
“You will not run. You will not try to contact anyone from your old life. You will stay with me every moment. Understand?”
I want to argue. Want to tell him to go to hell.
But he’s right. I can feel it through the binding, the absolute certainty that trying to run would be agony.
“Fine,” I force the word out. “Anything else?”
“Yes.” He moves behind my chair.
I tense immediately.
“You need to learn basic shadow magic control before we leave.”
“I told you. I don’t have?—”
“You do.” His voice comes from directly behind me now. “The binding is waking it, accelerating the process. If you do not learn control, you could kill yourself.” A pause. “Or worse. Open more rifts.”
My blood runs cold. For one second, I am back in Prague, watching the sky bleed because my hand touched glass.
“I wouldn’t?—”
“Not intentionally.” His hands settle on my shoulders, and I stop breathing entirely.
I expect force. Pain. Another reminder of what he can make me do.
I did not expect careful.
His touch is light, gentle almost. But I feel it everywhere, like an electric current under my skin, racing down my spine, pooling low in my body. The binding marks flare hot against my wrists.
“Your power is tied to emotion right now,” he says, voice lower, quieter. “Fear. Rage. Terror. When you feel those things, the shadows respond. They feed on it.” His thumbs press lightly at the base of my neck. “You need to learn control before something triggers a manifestation.”
I should move. Should shove him away. Should tell him to get his hands off me.
Instead, I sit frozen, every nerve ending locked onto where he is touching me.
“Let me teach you,” he murmurs.
The words break whatever spell is holding me. Because for one dangerous second, I wanted to.
I shove out of the chair and stumble forward two steps before spinning to face him.
“Don’t touch me.” My voice shakes with anger. “Don’t ever?—”
“Morgana—”
“I said NO.” I am already backing toward the door. My shoulder blades hit the wood. “You don’t get to do that. After everything you’ve done?—”
He doesn’t follow. Just watches me with that same steady intensity. “I am trying to help you.”
“You’re trying to control me. There’s a difference.” I grab the handle and yank the door open. “We leave for Earth tomorrow? Fine. We collect your damn mirror pieces. But don’t—” My breath catches. “Don’t pretend this is anything other than what it is.”
“And what is it?”
The question stops me in the doorway.
I look back at him. This impossibly beautiful monster who destroyed my life and bound me to him, and will not stop looking at me like I am something more than a tool.
“You tell me, Your Majesty.”
I am gone before he can answer.
The nightmare starts at 2 a.m.
I wake in darkness.
No. Not darkness.
Shadow.
Living, breathing, moving shadow pouring from my skin like blood from a wound.
I’m sitting up in bed. I don’t remember moving.
The shadows are spreading across the sheets, up the walls, consuming everything they touch. The furniture is breaking apart where the darkness reaches it. Black wood cracking. Velvet tearing as if it has been ripped by invisible hands. The window fractures with a sound like bone snapping.
“No.” My voice is small. Lost. “No, no, no?—”
The shadows pulse harder. They grow. They are feeding on me. On my fear. On every sharp breath I take that does not settle.
I try to pull them back. Try to stop them. It feels like trying to stop my own heartbeat with my bare hands.
They pour from me anyway. From my arms. My hands. Everywhere. The binding marks on my skin glow a deep, unnatural black, pulsing in time with the spreading darkness.
The wall cracks. The sound rolls through the room like thunder.
I’m going to bring the entire palace down. I’m going to kill everyone inside it.
The darkness keeps coming, slick and endless, dragging pieces of my fear with it.
I can’t stop it. I can’t control it. I can’t?—
He appears out of the darkness.
The air changes when he arrives, as if the room itself tightens in warning.
One moment, I am alone and drowning. The next, Azrael is there beside my bed. His eyes are wrong. Not dark blue. Not even close. Black from edge to edge, like something inside him has finally reached the surface.
He doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t pause to assess.
His shadows slam into mine.
For a heartbeat, they fight—my wild, chaotic darkness against his controlled power. Then his shadows wrap around mine like chains. Binding them. Pulling them back.
Pulling me back.
His hands close around my arms. Bare skin against bare skin. I’m in a tank top, nothing between us, and the contact feels like fire under my skin. The binding surges so bright it burns behind my eyes.
“Breathe.” His voice cuts straight through the noise. Commanding. Absolute. “Morgana, breathe.”
I cannot. My lungs refuse to obey. The shadows are still pouring out of me even as his power contains them.
He pulls me forward.
I hit his chest.
His arms lock around me immediately. One hand spread across my back, the other holding the back of my head, keeping me there. He holds me so tightly I can feel his heartbeat against my cheek. Steady. Unshaken.
“Feel my power,” he says into my hair. “Feel how it moves. Controlled. Directed. Let it guide yours.”
His shadows move over me again. Not restraining me. Something else. They slide against my skin, cool and strange, almost calming. They meet my chaos and do not fight it so much as slow it, steady it, force it into rhythm.
The destruction hesitates.
“That is it.” His hand moves in slow circles on my back, grounding and repetitive. “Follow my rhythm. In. Out. Control.”
I focus on him. On his breathing. The rise and fall of his chest. The way his shadows pulse in time with it, as if they belong to the same heartbeat.
Mine begins to match it.
The furniture stops breaking apart. The cracks in the wall stop spreading.
“Good,” he says, quieter now. Almost careful. “You are doing it. Just breathe.”
I am breathing. Shaking. Pressed against him in nothing but sleep clothes while his arms hold me together and our magic tangles in ways I don’t understand.
The shadows sink back into my skin. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like they are being called home.
And then they are gone.
I’m left gasping. Trembling. His hands are still on me, one at my back, one cradling my head like I might break apart again if he lets go. I can smell him now. Ozone and something dark and clean underneath it. Something that’s just him.
“You cannot fight this alone,” he says, his lips brushing my hair as he speaks. “Stop being stubborn and let me help you.”
I should move away from him. I should put space between us.
Instead, I stay frozen. His heartbeat is steady against my ear. His hands are warm on my skin. The binding humming between us is like a living thing.
The worst part is not that he’s holding me.
The worst part is that I’ve stopped trying to escape his arms.
And I realize with sick clarity:
This is going to destroy me.
Not the binding. Not the magic.
Him.