Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SANORA
When I reached the house, another food box was waiting on the front porch, this one in a different colour. How many boxes had he purchased?
I sighed, crouching to pick it up, my body still humming from the jog. With a small grunt, I pushed the door open and stepped inside, letting it shut behind me with a soft thud.
I strolled to the kitchen island and set the box down, pulling a bottle of water from the fridge and drinking before setting it on the counter.
Without even opening the food box, I drifted to my room, shedding my shoes at the door and heading straight for the bathroom. My sweat-soaked clothes clung stubbornly to my skin until I tore them off and let them fall to the floor.
The shower hissed to life, steam clouding the small room.
I stepped beneath it, tilting my head back, the water cascading down my spine.
I scrubbed every inch of my body clean, as if I could wash away not just sweat but the restlessness crawling beneath it.
I took my time washing my hair, ignoring the way my breathing was unsteady.
I was nervous. So nervous I couldn’t bring myself to read the next letter waiting in that box. If it was about me, I didn’t want to open it.
Although every part of me wanted to. Gods, I wanted to. but fear sat like a stone in my stomach. I wanted to know how I was connected to all of this, what soul Winifred was talking about, how Thrax could be borrowing it. I wanted to know everything.
But what if I didn’t like what I found? What if it was the kind of truth you wish you could unsee?
With a tired breath, I turned off the shower and stepped out, water sliding down my calves to pool at my feet.
I reached for the fourth outfit—another one of Thrax’s thoughtful pairings, the top folded neatly over matching shorts.
It had become oddly easy to get dressed these days, and it was all because of his pairing.
Once dressed, I padded barefoot back to the kitchen.
The box sat where I’d left it, and I stood in front of it for a long moment, just staring.
Then finally, I reached in and began pulling everything out, piece by piece.
..including the letters that were lying flat under.
Yes, there were two letters. On top of a big one was a small folded piece of paper.
My throat tightened as I zipped the lid back on the box and slid it beside the other three he’d delivered in the past days.
I didn’t eat properly yesterday because of the letters he sent, they kept playing like a loop inside my mind—his words. I couldn’t digest anything without suppressing the urge to throw up.
I didn’t want to repeat that. So I started eating right there, forcing the food down while my eyes flicked to the folded papers on the countertop, mind jittery like I was about to check an exam result I’d studied for a year to pass.
When I swallowed the last bite and cleared the plates, I drank from my water bottle to soothe my nerves. Then, finally, I sat down and picked up the small paper on top, unfolding it with fingers that wouldn’t stay still.
His handwriting sprawled plain and short across the page.
Sanora, while reading this next and last letter, I need you to calm down. You can do that for me, yeah?
If anything, that just made my pulse spike. My palms slickened with sweat, my heart beating out of rhythm. Still, I pulled a steady breath through my nose, exhaled slowly, and unfolded the larger letter.
The curse can be broken.
After the curse, a prophecy was made. If I’m being honest, at that moment, a part of me had wished I wasn’t given redemption. I’d already disrupted the balance by waking from the dead, and in some ridiculous way, the universe tried to even the scales by giving me a way out of the curse.
Kalimetryna’s soul didn’t perish with her.
While Selvanyra took my soul and locked it away forever, Kalimetryna’s soul had been kept for the process of reincarnation which happened fourteen centuries later.
Her soul was born again into a different body twenty-three years ago, and I’ve been tied to her since the day she took her first breath.
I didn’t anticipate being connected to her, but perhaps that was the point — they wanted me to know what it feels like to have a soul again after so many years of living without one, wanted me to know what it is to feel like human once again without completely being human.
That way, the desire to feel complete would be so overwhelming I’d have no choice but to convince her to surrender her soul for me, knowing it’d kill her if she did.
The reason she keeps dreaming of my past is because of the soul.
The soul inside her had lived in that moment, and it remembers.
She once asked me, but the only emotion I can feel is hers, and I meant it when I told her I break twice as hard when she’s hurt.
The curse may have chained her soul to me, the universe may have thrown us together.
But don’t mistake my feelings for fate. She is mine because I have chosen her, because I would tear down gods and moons and every century I’ve endured just to keep her.
Salvation means nothing to me anymore. I’ve loved her, and the depth of that love terrifies me.
Eternity was empty and meaningless until her.
She is the first thing in centuries that has ever made me want to truly live.
The only way the curse can be broken is with her death...if she gives me her soul. But Sanora, I will damn the altar itself before I let her die for me. What is the point of living when the only life that makes mine worth anything is gone?
So yes, Nher, the curse can be broken. But I will not break it with her blood. I would rather carry my curse into a thousand more lifetimes than sacrifice the only girl I have ever truly loved.
And you must not even think about it, because no prophecy, no god, no curse, is worth you.
My hands shook as the paper slid from my grip to the floor.
I was…I was carrying Kalimetryna’s soul.
Kalimetryna’s soul was inside me?
“...I won’t let you surrender your life to break the bastard’s curse.”
That was what Winifred had meant all along. Thrax’s curse could only be broken…by me.
But setting him free meant…dying.
A tear slipped from my eye as they dropped to where the sheet lay on the ground, the words swimming up at me and circling through my skull like a broken loop that refused to stop.
Thrax’s freedom was at the cost of my life.
How? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
The realisation reached inside my chest, yanked my beating organ out, trampled it, shoved it back into place and drove a blunt knife through it again and again.
I couldn’t even breathe without the pain splintering through my chest. I couldn’t cry the way my heart wanted to, not in the desperate, choking way it demanded.
It was as if I had no more tears to shed.
Or maybe I was just in shock, maybe my mind was just too numb, struggling to process that I was only a vessel, that I was nothing but a container for the soul of the moon’s offspring.
That the sole purpose of my existence had been mapped and decided before I’d ever drawn breath.
My life wasn’t mine. I was something moulded and created to fulfil a prophecy.
The soul inside me wasn’t mine.
I didn’t even have an original soul.
My entire existence was a lie.
The Soulless Man could only be saved with my death.
He could only truly live when I no longer existed.
And as if a love between a mortal and an immortal wasn’t already tragic enough, the man I loved would live again…but I had to die.