Chapter 53
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THRAX
History was repeating itself.
He couldn’t let it happen.
“Sanora!”
Through the dead of night and the roaring storm, his voice tore through the chaos, louder than the thunder, shaking the trees as it carried through the forest. His heart was pounding too violently, his chest heavy with fear.
His feet moved of their own accord, the ground seeming to bend for him, paths carving open as he ran.
Sanora.
The only woman who mattered in his life.
He had never despised himself more than he did now. He’d felt her pain, her terror, her grief, her despair. Every pulse of her emotions had slammed into him, yet he couldn’t do anything about it because he’d been trapped inside the house.
It had begun twenty minutes after Sanora left—energy crawling across the floorboards, swallowing the walls, sealing the air itself. He had stood from the bed to check, only to realise he couldn’t touch anything. Runes flared invisibly on the walls, appearing only when he tried to touch them.
He'd realised he couldn’t lay a hand on the walls, the door, or the windows without his skin sizzling and smoking, the ward hissing against him like red-hot iron pressed to flesh.
The entire house had been bound in silence from the outside while he was in bed. By the time he sensed the distortion in the air, it was already too late. The Veil of Ash had been drawn, and he was caged.
He’d texted her instantly, already knowing what Winifred had done. But she had not texted back. She had not replied, and she had not come back home.
He’d lost it.
Even though every surface scorched him, he’d hurled himself at the doors, the windows, again and again—skin burning, healing, and burning anew in a vicious cycle.
He’d done that for hours without pause, until the twins arrived. At first, relief had flooded him—he thought Sanora was with them. But she wasn’t.
She’d been abducted.
That was what he needed to hear. Hours of studying it made him realise that the spell didn’t just burn, it fed off his power.
The more he fought, the stronger it got.
But also, the more furious and desperate he became, the thinner it grew.
Her abduction had triggered a bond surge between them, his desperation channelled into raw, unrefined magic that the seal wasn’t built to handle.
And an hour later, the spell began to fracture beneath his persistence. His fury tore through the ward until the Veil shrieked like shattering glass, letting him break through, her emotions pulling him forward like a compass.
A pain had struck him in his stomach five steps out of the house, and he knew what it was. Knew it from the times he’d driven a blade into himself.
He’d felt it the instant she was stabbed, and it had torn through his gut, through his goddamned heart.
It almost dropped him to his knees, but he funnelled that pain into his stride and ran harder. The cold rain lashed at him, and although he wasn’t wearing his gloves or coat, he felt nothing but the screaming pulse of Sanora through the bond.
She’d been stabbed, and judging by the depth of the pain, it had been bad.
Deep.
Fuck.
He sprinted past the site of her ritual, barely registering the bodies lying on the ground until he stepped over one.
Now he was running faster, knowing exactly where she was going.
The cave.
She was heading there to do the one thing he had begged her not to. She thought she was dying, and she wanted to leave him with the last piece of herself. Leave him alone in this cursed world.
“Sanora!” he roared, running past the creatures Selvanyra had sent after her. For once, they wanted the same thing—for Sanora not to reach that cave. Hell, they had wanted the same thing from the start.
Selvanyra didn’t want him to get the soul.
He never wanted Sanora to die for him.
Never.
“Sanora, don’t you dare!”
His heart hammered, not from exhaustion, but from the gnawing fear of being too late. The fear that she might step into the cave before he could reach her.
He could feel her closing in. He could feel the cave’s pulse echoing through her.
“Sanora!” His voice cracked through the forest, mingling with the shrieks of monsters, the crash of thunder, and the pounding rain.
He reached the twins—one slumped against a tree, the other on hands and knees, head bowed in devastation.
He ran past them, and in the black curtain of the storm, he saw her disappearing into the cave’s mouth.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
He pushed harder, vision blurring with rain. This was why he had never wanted her near that place, why even the mention of it had made him furious.
The cave could harm anyone and anything…but them. Its boundary wouldn’t kill her as it would others.
No, it would welcome her.
He reached the mouth of the cave and slammed into an unseen force, the impact throwing him back so hard his boots skidded on the soaked ground.
He staggered once, twice, then lunged forward again, crashing into the barrier with a snarl, his fists slamming against it as though brute strength could break something born of a supernatural will.
“Sanora,” he rasped, breath hitching, almost out of air. “Sanora. Come out, please.”
He hammered the invisible wall again, his whole being fraying from the endless barrage of spells and wards that had kept him from her all day long.
“Sanora, come out! Don’t you dare try that.” His voice rose, raw, hoping it could reach her through the cave’s darkness. “What makes you think I won’t kill myself the moment I become mortal? Huh? You know it’s pointless without you. Come out of there, Nher.”
His fists collided with the unseen resistance again and again, even knowing he couldn’t break it. The only way to reach Sanora was if she chose to step out herself. And deep down, he already knew she wouldn’t.
“Sanora,” he pleaded. “If you stay in there too long, you won’t be able to come out again. Come out, please.”
He had spent almost twenty-four years coming to this cave, years spent trying to sabotage Sanora’s chance of giving him her soul. From the day she was born, he’d known he would never accept salvation like that again.
And so he had kept returning to this place, again and again, preparing for the day she might find her way here. He had sworn she wouldn’t succeed in sacrificing herself for him. She wouldn’t find the one thing that could take her life.
The pin.
But the pin was immovable. The only thing that could easily remove it was that soul. Sanora was carrying the soul of the pin’s owner, and the pin would know her.
Thrax had dedicated days and hours to remove and vanquish it from this world, poisoning the earth with his cursed blood, just so he could rot the grounds, thereby rotting the pin from the roots and making it easier to pull out.
And now, everything he had done was in vain. He had been so close, the pin had begun to shift. It had only needed a little more of his blood, a little more time.
Thrax continued pounding the shield, though he knew. He had seen it in her eyes the first time she spoke of it—how ready she was to die so he could live. He had seen the raw desperation and the plea in her gaze.
And he had hated it. Hated that she even thought he could live in a world without her, where he couldn’t feel her warmth, couldn’t hear her laugh, couldn’t watch her sleep, couldn’t watch her turn the smallest, most meaningless actions into something that fascinated him.
The ground trembled beneath his feet.
The pin.
She had removed the pin.
Terror locked his body as he hammered the barrier harder.
“Sanora!” he roared, the name tearing out of his throat, his whole body trembling from the reality of losing her.
He didn’t want to lose her.
But it already felt like he had.
The pin punctured her skin.
In the night, a wail tore from him, so deep and devastating it shook the very sky. It cut through the storm louder than the rain, louder than the thunder, a sound that was not just a scream but a shattering, jagged, broken thing dragged out of the depth of his being, heart splitting in two.
He sank to his knees as he felt the thread between them snap, agony burning through his chest until it sent him sprawling forward.
His hand clawed at his sternum, over the scar, as though he could hold his heart together by force alone.
He could feel her slipping away, feel death’s cold fingers prying her from his skin.
And gods, it hurt.
It hurt more than the day she had first been bound to him. This severing was worse. He felt it in his bones, in his marrow.
It tore him apart. And in that moment, he didn’t want to survive it.