Chapter 41 Bronwen
Bronwen
The air left my lungs.
I had never considered this possibility.
Not once.
My knees hit the ground before I realized my body had given up trying to stand. The impact jarred through my bones, but I barely felt it. Every wall I had built over the centuries—every careful layer of control, every polished, bloodless version of myself I wore for the world—collapsed all at once.
Losing him.
Losing our baby.
The love.
The torture.
All of it surged forward at once, centuries of restraint shattering in a single suffocating wave that stole what little air I had left.
I tasted iron.
I couldn’t tell if it was blood or memory.
Maybe there was no difference anymore.
He was in front of me in an instant. Solid. Warm. Impossible.
His hands came up to cup my face the way they had a thousand times before, thumbs brushing my cheeks like they had never forgotten the shape of me.
“August?”
The name tore out of me before I could stop it—broken, ugly, soaked in the kind of sobs I hadn’t allowed myself since the day he died.
“It’s me, baby.”
That voice.
Gods.
My hands trembled as I lifted them, half-expecting my fingers to close around nothing. I had lived with that emptiness for too long. I had learned to expect it. To brace for the moment when the world reminded me that he was gone.
But when my hands reached him, my fingers curled into the fabric at his shoulders.
Real.
I grabbed him harder than I meant to, clutching him like he might vanish if I loosened my grip. My nails dug into his chest as if pain alone might anchor him here, as if the force of it could stop whatever strange miracle had put him back in front of me from taking him away again.
I buried my face in his chest, the sound that came out of me raw and humiliating and completely beyond my control. His arms wrapped around me immediately, one hand sliding into my hair as he held me against him.
“Hey,” he murmured softly.
The word vibrated through his chest beneath my cheek.
“Hey… look at me.”
He pulled back just enough to lift my face, his thumbs brushing away the tears that kept spilling faster than I could stop them.
“I’m here,” he murmured. “And I’m never leaving you again.”
“You’re dead,” I whispered, the words trembling as hysteria bled through them. “You’re dead. I watched you leave. I destroyed your body. I—”
My throat closed.
“This isn’t funny,” I choked out. “Don’t do this to me.”
He rested his forehead gently against mine. “I know,” he said softly. “I don’t understand it either. But something happened in the blade. The ground shook. The sky opened.” His eyes flickered briefly, remembering. “And the souls were pulled out.”
My heart stuttered painfully in my chest.
“I used the blade,” I breathed, the realization settling heavily in my lungs. “But how are you… you? Why aren’t you like the others? Why aren’t you a mindless, mangled soul like the rest of them?”
August’s hand slid up to my jaw, his thumb brushing slowly across my skin as if grounding himself just as much as he was grounding me.
“When the sky opened,” he said, “Carrow and my father and everyone else he put in there fought it. They grabbed trees. Rocks. Whatever they could cling to. They didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t fight it. I let it take me.”
My breath caught.
“I didn’t care where it led,” he said. “I just needed out.”
The simplicity of it twisted something painfully inside my chest. It didn’t matter how. It didn’t matter why. The gods themselves could have cracked the ground open beneath our feet and swallowed us whole and I would have thanked them if this was the result.
Because this—
This was everything I had dreamed about for centuries.
Every lonely night.
Every heart I had denied myself because mine had already chosen and refused to let go.
I had lived an eternity with a ghost beside me, loving him in silence, in memory, in rage.
And now he was here.
Whole.
Breathing.
Looking at me like I was still the center of his world.
How was this the price I had to pay for using the blade—when it was the only thing I had ever truly wanted?
I didn’t question it.
I didn’t care if it was impossible.
I had lost him once.
And I would burn the entire world before I let anything take him from me again.