Chapter 36 #2
Jude exhales sharply, running a trembling hand through his damp hair. “You keep saying I’m not alone, Lorien. But I can feel it. This thing inside me. It’s clawing at me. Splitting me apart piece by piece. And I don’t know how much longer I can fight it.”
He looks like he’s teetering on the edge of an oblivion neither of us has the courage to name.
“That’s why I have to go. It’s our only chance.”
Jude shakes his head. “No.”
I falter. “Jude—”
“No,” he says again, and this time, his voice is steadier, more certain. He takes a step toward me, then another, until we’re so close I can feel the heat of him, even through the damp chill of the room. “You're not doing this alone.”
A lump forms in my throat. “I have to. I can’t let this happen to you, Jude. I can’t—”
“If something happens to you, I won’t survive it.” His hand finds mine, fingers threading together with a grip that’s almost desperate. “We go together, or not at all.”
The storm outside crashes against the dome, another shuddering pulse of power rolling through the city. A reminder that time is slipping through our fingers.
I look at him, really look at him. His jaw is set with determination, the weight of magic presses against his skin, and the exhaustion shadows his eyes. He’s breaking apart, but he’s still here. Still fighting.
And I can’t leave him behind.
But taking him with me might kill him.
A hollow ache carves through my ribs, cold and relentless.
If I lose him, if I bring him to the Temple of Helena and it rips him apart, if I have to watch the light in his eyes flicker out and know that it was because I couldn’t save him, then I know that I won’t survive it.
The thought alone feels like drowning, like the crushing weight of the ocean pressing against my lungs, demanding surrender.
I want to be selfish. I want to tell him to stay, to let me carry this burden alone, because the risk of losing him is so much worse than the thought of losing myself.
But Jude isn’t a thing I can keep safe in the dark, hidden away from danger.
He’s fire and fury and love that refuses to let go, even when it’s killing him.
And the truth is, I need him.
I need him to live.
Even if I do not.
“Please, Jude,” I whisper. “Please stay where you are safe.”
Jude’s breath hitches, and when I force myself to meet his eyes, I see the flicker of betrayal, of anguish carved deep into the lines of his face. He shakes his head, jaw clenched so tightly I can see the tremor in it.
“Safe?” His voice is raw, almost broken. “You think I could be safe without you?”
The edges of him press against my skin, his darkness as heavy as the tide, as relentless as the storm we’re caught in. The seabed trembles beneath us, the city groaning like a living thing, trapped by the pull of something vast and inescapable.
The Temple of Helena is waiting.
So is the ruin that might come with it.
Jude steps closer, and I can feel the unsteadiness in his breath, the way his whole body shudders with the effort of holding himself together.
“You don’t get to make this choice for me, Lorien. Not this one. You don’t get to leave me behind.”
Terror claws at my throat, because I know he’s right. But if I take him with me—if I let him step into that temple, into the jaws of an uncertainty that neither of us can predict—what if I lose him? What if it devours him, and I have to watch?
What if I survive and he doesn’t?
“I can’t—” The words splinter apart in my throat, too jagged to speak.
Jude cups my face, his hands warm against the cold that has settled into my bones. “You can,” he murmurs. “Because we do this together, or not at all.”
I nod, defeated.
Not by battle.
Not by magic.
But by the man who unraveled me piece by piece and put me back together with his hands, his lips, his impossible heart.
The human I took as a slave, a plaything, a momentary indulgence.
And yet, somewhere between the cruelty and the hunger, between the nights spent tangled in sheets and the wars waged between our souls, he became something else.
Everything.
He is the fire I could not smother, the tide that never turned away, the only thing in this world I am terrified to lose.
And I will lose him.
Whether to the temple, to the magic clawing at his veins, or to the gods who have never been kind, I do not know.
But I feel it, like the ocean pressing in, the inevitability of drowning.
A tremor rattles through the palace, and another crack splinters across the glass dome in front of us. The temple I have spent my life bowing before is collapsing. It is breaking as I have broken, crumbling beneath the weight of Jude and the power that rages inside him.
And I cannot control him.
I do not want to.
The dome groans, a final breath before it gives way entirely. Glass and divinity shatter as one.
My temple is lost.
My fate is sealed.
I press my forehead to his, swallowing down the grief, the fear, the love so sharp it tastes like blood.
“Together,” I whisper.