Chapter 37
Sleep, like comfort and clarity and control, lurked out of my reach for another night, its gaze ever-fixed and cruel.
After looking at the bedside clock for the twelfth time, I decided to climb into Heraphia’s bed. The hour was early, gray light barely leaking through the mist, and yet she was already awake, staring up at the ceiling like the stone might crack and crush her.
As if she prayed it would.
I hadn’t seen her at all since yesterday. True to her word, the servants had taken care of my every need. I’d scarcely had to lift a finger except when I was working out my knee.
Her absence also meant she hadn’t been here for me to talk to about the Issaraeth when I’d left him staring after me in the hall.
A heavy sigh escaped me as I settled on my back. The flicker of a candle on the ceiling captured my attention.
“Morning,” she whispered without looking at me. For a few minutes, we watched the dance of fire together in amicable silence.
Yet my mind allowed me no such luxury.
I’d wished for my best friend’s advice more than once while traveling from the lake country to Sivy. But now that the opportunity to seek it dawned, I found myself unable to form the shape of words. To reveal the awful fate that had befallen me.
“Our bond locked into place.” The phrase wrenched out of me, along with a wave of guilt for not being strong enough to outrun the Issaraeth.
Heraphia reached for the ceiling, twisting her hand like the shadows slipped between her fingers, before letting her arm fall to her side again. “I figured as much.”
“I hate it.” But a lie weighed the confession down. Loathing was the primary emotion, yes, but there was so much more to it than that. “I’ve forsaken the Elessarum. All those who have died. My parents. Zuriel. You.”
Heraphia remained silent, blinking every so often at the ceiling. “Then what had you so upset upon arrival?”
Damn her for spearing straight into the heart of the matter. “We’d grown closer on the road to Sivy. Goddess, I was so stupid.” Icy rage climbed my throat at the memory of him kissing Dasha. I cleared it before continuing. “And when I arrived, I learned that he is betrothed to another.”
Heraphia’s head whipped toward mine, brows furrowing. “And he didn’t tell you?”
“No.” I gritted my teeth around the word. “I feel…betrayed.”
And it hurt so fucking bad because I missed him.
The past two mornings without him had dug a wound deep inside me.
Over the weeks we traveled together, I’d relaxed into knowing he’d protect me.
Slept through the night beside him because of it.
And now that I’d been slapped with the reminder he was always going to break me in the end…
A deluge of grief drowned me. I berated myself for my foolishness, for believing in a fantasy. For finding an ounce of good in him. For hanging onto every vulnerable word he said.
I sniffed, wiping my nose on my sleeve. He’d already had enough of my tears.
“Hmm,” she murmured, turning back to the dancing light. “Why don’t you fill me in from the point we parted?”
I propped up on my elbow so I could look her in the eye.
“I will, but first, tell me, are you okay, Heraphia? Zuriel is gone. I wasn’t here.
You are like this.” I gestured to how she was lying on the bed.
Even with her hands resting on her stomach, her shoulders quaked like they couldn’t hold the position.
“And you look like you haven’t slept much since we parted. "
“I haven’t.” She let the confession linger in the stillness. “I miss him, Sylaira.” One salty drop leaked out, and then another. I reached to wipe them from her cheeks, but she tensed.
My hand hovered in the chasm between us.
She released a shuddering breath and a subtle nod.
I dried her face while her lips rolled. “I’ve never suppressed my Sight like you have, but this…
this is exhausting. It’s all the time. When I’m awake, when I’m asleep.
When I’m walking. Those crystal chairs are a death sentence, not an altar upon which to receive divine messages. ” She winced at the mention of them.
Unease curdled in my gut. I’d been preoccupied with settling in yesterday and my session with the healer, so I hadn’t ventured through the other door, where everyone else seemed to disappear for hours on end.
“So please, please tell me a story. Something of the past. Because the future is too uncertain. And I don’t want to See any more of it right now,” she begged, finally meeting my gaze, her aquamarine eyes shining.
“Okay, I’ve got you,” I choked out, my own vision blurring. Careful not to jostle my knee, I scooted closer and wrapped my arms around her. For a moment, she resisted, and then she clutched me back, like her grip alone could prevent me from leaving her too.
Once she’d calmed again, I began my tale of everything that had happened since the Issaraeth and his soldiers had stormed Ithuriel’s estate. How I’d fled toward Vaels?r and been mere feet away from haven when he’d snatched me from the sky.
Then, of my escape attempt that ended in our mating bond snapping into place. Of his elation shattering when I rejected him immediately. Of the times he Commanded me.
My decision to attempt to manipulate him.
My decision to allow him to touch me after he showed me the broken pieces of him.
My decision to believe him when he said he wanted me.
All the choices I made that led me here—lying beside Heraphia, ribs cracked open, heart bleeding out, and not even the Goddess could stitch me whole again.
“What guts me most is that I was starting to feel sympathy for him. He has these words carved into his chest, and I think his father was the one to put him there. Duty above all. He said once that his power is a derivation of his father’s, and that his fundamental will was altered somehow,” I finished, Heraphia’s tunic now damp from all of my crying.
I withheld the brief mention of him consuming blood from a Demon.
He never explained what it meant or what had happened because of it, and I got the sense that it was a wound as deep as the one in his flesh.
Heraphia’s eyes were no drier than mine. “He has a duty to you now, as his mate.”
“As he keeps saying,” I grumbled. But he’d shown me the exact opposite since our arrival at Thalvireth Palace. Goddess, even before then. His words were lies wrapped in velvet, and I didn’t know which scraped true anymore.
“Mating bonds should surpass all other duties,” she said slowly, like she was turning over an idea in her mind.
The scoff slipped out before I could stop it. “They should. When he found me with the healer, he was a male possessed. Obsessed.” I didn’t tell her that his protectiveness curled something molten and unwanted low in my belly. Or that it filled me with primal fear too.
“He couldn’t take his eyes off of me, and he even promised to cut off the healer’s hands if he didn’t remove them from my body.” Worst of all, the thrill that threat offered…excited me.
Almost a month mated to the male, and I was already losing myself to the intoxicating promise of his violence.
Heraphia’s brows rose, and she pressed her lips together like she was smothering a laugh.
“What?” I prodded, intuition pricking at my senses.
She shook her head, a small smile tugging at her lips. “Males. Don’t you remember how Zuriel was when we first started courting?”
While they weren’t mates, Zuriel had been tormented when another Elessarum male so much as looked in Heraphia’s direction.
The strife between House Ilythar? and Heraphia’s family hadn’t helped matters, not when Ithuriel was moments away from snatching his heir from our peaceful group and forcing him to serve his house whether he liked it or not.
“I do,” I replied, a decade flashing through my mind in an instant. It was so long ago now, and yet it felt like no time had passed at all. Too much of it spent on the run, the same day repeating on an endless loop. “He would have done anything for you.”
“Still would,” she murmured, attention going vacant, like she was picturing him now, marching off to war. We lingered in that solemn silence together while I gathered the courage to voice what nipped at my every nerve.
“So why hasn’t the Issaraeth broken off his betrothal?” I didn’t want to sound as bitter about it as I did. But this fucking chain binding me to him wound tighter each day, constricting my ribs until it was impossible to draw a breath.
“Have you asked him?” Heraphia shuffled away from me, turning onto her side and propping her head on her closed fist.
“Of course,” I huffed, mirroring her position.
“And what did he say?”
“It’s complicated,” I mocked his deep, velvety voice as best I could.
A laugh burst out of my friend. I couldn’t help but join her, a smile finally blooming on my face.
“He did give me something important though. After what happened, I honestly thought he wouldn’t.
” I sighed. Even then, the astringent taste of virelthorn lingered on my tongue.
A promise that no matter what happened between my mate and me, I wouldn’t See.
Death and doom wouldn’t haunt me like a specter in the forest.
“Another vial?” she whispered, her voice barely audible, like she didn’t want to speak the word aloud because the stone was spying.
“Yes,” I murmured, attention flicking around the room and landing on the light leaking below the door. If anyone was listening, we would have sensed them on the fringes of our awareness.
I scooted toward the headboard to prop myself up just in case the shadow of boots passed by with the morning rituals fast approaching.
Heraphia shuffled to sit beside me, color returned to her cheeks.
She no longer appeared so exhausted; instead, a glint sparked in her irises—a manic, crazed light that knotted my insides.
“You need to keep manipulating him, Sylaira. It’s clear he’s willing to do anything to have you.
We can use that to get out of here. To find Zuriel again.
The three of us can go back into hiding. ”
The desperation in her words shone clearer than the skies over the vast southern lakes. But could I blame her? Zuriel and Heraphia didn’t share a mating bond, but they loved each other with a depth that rivaled oceans.
The female sitting beside me was so different from the one I’d run with all those weeks ago. And yet, she was still my sister—even if not by blood. This place, this situation, the separation, all of it was taking a toll on her—at least that was the lie I fed myself.
“But our bond will always lead him straight to me. We’d never be safe.” My voice cracked on the last word. Not to mention that even now, after he’d hurt me, the idea of doing what his father had done to him still didn’t settle well into my bones.
“Maybe he would let you go,” she offered, hope highlighting her lifted brows.
But there was none left in me about my situation. “I’m shackled. There will never be freedom again for me.” I grasped her hands in mine. “But I promise, Heraphia, I will do what I can to get him to let you go so that you can reunite with Zuriel. You don’t deserve any of this.”
“Neither do you.” Her eyes softened, and the corner of her mouth dipped down.
“I will help you however I can. Maybe I can share some of my visions with you so that you don’t have to have them.
We have quotas. I usually meet mine within a few days.
Whatever I have left, I will whisper to you in the dark so no one suspects anything. ”
Hot salt pricked the back of my nose again. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Let’s hope it never has to come to that again. That somehow Zahal Ishim defeats the Demons on his next campaign and neither of us are forced to See again. Maybe you’ll even find you can live with your fated mate.”
She released my hands, and I tucked my long hair behind my ears.
“After everything he’s done? I’m not so sure.
” But even as I spoke the words, they tasted like ash.
All of the good things he told me—about saving Ilae’s clutch, forgoing tithes, and more—emerged from the back of my mind.
Along with all the glimmers of his trauma he’d shared.
The Issaraeth was an enigma, a complicated male, and not entirely the villain I had thought he was.
But he still killed people I loved. Hunted us down like we were animals. Commanded me to do things against my will.
And as I climbed out of Heraphia’s bed to prepare for my day, my discordant thoughts pelted me like hail.
Because I knew one thing for certain: when I went to the healer’s again, the Issaraeth would be there.
And I didn’t know whether seeing him again would infuriate me—or break me.