Chapter 4
Delia
Lord Thorne’s Bedchamber, Ashfell
How is this my life?
Masha—because yes, apparently that is the terrifyingly competent woman Thorne left me with—is not a maid so much as a force of nature.
A Demon version of a no-nonsense headmistress from every boarding school movie ever made. The kind who can silence a room with a look and probably has opinions about posture.
She explains briskly how to work the shower in the enormous bathing chamber attached to Thorne’s rooms.
The obsidian walls glow faintly with heat, veins of ember pulsing like a slow heartbeat.
The water is hot, mineral rich, smelling faintly of smoke and something floral I can’t name.
I shower, using luxurious soap I find in gold bottles and bowls.
Then I am… processed.
There is no other word for it.
If this is a spa day, then it’s one run by a woman who would absolutely kill you if you complained about the pressure.
I am scrubbed, creamed, massaged until every knot I didn’t know I carried gives up and dissolves.
My hair is washed, blown dry, coaxed into soft waves.
My face is painted with a light, careful, almost reverent hand.
By the time Masha steps back, I’m barely recognizable to myself.
Now she’s fitting me into a dress.
A white dress.
Long, flowing, sleeveless.
The fabric is light as breath, yet it shimmers—like a million stars fell out of the sky and someone sewed them into silk.
It pools at my feet, glowing softly against the dark stone floor.
I stare at my reflection.
The woman in the mirror looks powerful.
Not delicate. Not fragile.
Like someone who belongs somewhere important.
I don’t recognize her.
“Why white,” I ask finally, my voice sounding strange in the vast room, “if everything here is so dark?”
Masha doesn’t look up from adjusting the fall of the fabric at my shoulder.
“White is a symbol of fortune and luck,” she says. “And the master will need both to pull this off, I would wager.”
My stomach tightens. “Pull this off?”
She stills.
“It is not my place—”
“Well,” I say, meeting her eyes in the mirror, nerves buzzing, “that doesn’t seem to be stopping you. So why not just go for broke?”
She studies me for a long moment.
Then she nods.
“If you insist, milady.”
There it is.
A flicker of something in her gaze—approval, maybe. Respect.
Pride fills me.
And in about a minute I know I should have held onto that feeling.
Because once she starts talking, once I really understand, everything shifts.
Thorne didn’t take me to ravage me like some fae prince out of those wildly popular romantasy books I keep seeing on social media and never have time to read.
There is no decadent cruelty in this.
No idle hunger.
He took me because he is desperate.
Because his people are hurting, being forced into war and ruin.
Because The Ember Vein—the source of something so fundamental it makes my head spin to think about—is under threat.
Because without it—without Nightfall—worlds unravel.
Dreams fail. Hope thins.
Entire universes go quiet.
To save it? Thorne needs a matebond.
A zareth.
A viyella.
Me.
He needs me.
He didn’t choose me because I’m pretty. Or interesting. Or because I kissed him back.
He didn’t pick me because I’m special or because he wanted to keep me.
He chose me because he thinks I can save his people.
The EMT part of me—the part that runs toward danger when everyone else runs away, the part of me that promised to save lives—understands that kind of decision with brutal clarity.
Risk everything to save someone.
Risk yourself to save many.
That logic? That I get.
It sits heavy and familiar in my chest.
But is it wrong that it still makes me sad?
That some small, selfish part of me wishes he wanted me just for me?
I swallow hard, hands curling in the fabric of the dress.
Because whatever else this is, whatever mess of magic and fire and fate I’ve fallen into—I know I can’t be responsible for a world dying.
If binding myself to Thorne can stop that—if standing beside him can keep his people alive, keep The Ember Vein burning—then I will do it.
Not because I was kidnapped.
Not because I was told.
But because this is who I am.
I’m not a hero.
I’ve never wanted to be one.
Heroes are statues and stories and people who don’t flinch.
I save people. Or I get hurt trying.
That’s the job. That’s the calling.
That’s the thing that crawled into my bones long before I ever put on an EMT uniform.
You see someone bleeding out, someone trapped, someone afraid—and you move.
You don’t stop to calculate the cost to yourself.
You just go.
Standing here, wrapped in white and starlight, knowing what comes next, I feel that same familiar tightening in my chest. The moment right before the leap.
I only hope I’m strong enough to withstand what I’m bound to feel after Thorne is finished touching me.
Because he will.
According to Masha, that’s how mates are claimed in Nightfall.
First comes the ceremony. We’ll stand beneath the open sky, before the Great Flame—the massive hearth at the heart of Ashfell that has burned since before Thorne was born. Before his people. Before the Fates themselves, if Masha is to be believed.
We’ll speak vows. Bindings. Promises that sound older than language and heavier than marriage ever did back home.
And we will become one in the eyes of Nightfall.
Then, well, then the bond is sealed in the only way this realm understands.
With sex.
The word lands oddly in my head.
Clinical. Detached.
Like I can file it away under procedure and be done with it.
It’s perfunctory, I tell myself.
Ritual. Magic. Part of the deal.
And, okay—after kissing him, I have to admit that sleeping with Thorne will not be a hardship.
The man is impossible to ignore.
All muscle and heat and presence.
Dark tattoos tracing his shoulders and back like stories written in flame.
Tawny skin.
Sharp, devastating features.
Eyes that glow like firelight catching at the edge of night.
He is intensity made flesh.
But that’s the problem.
For me, sex has never been just physical.
I tried that once. Friends with benefits. Clear rules. No expectations.
I fell.
He didn’t.
And I was the one who had to walk away with my heart bruised and my pride in tatters.
So the idea of giving myself to Thorne—of letting magic and fire and fate bind us through something so intimate—it terrifies me in a way I don’t know how to explain.
Because what if I can’t keep my heart out of it?
What if I don’t want to?
I press my palms together, breathing through the swirl of fear and resolve and something dangerously close to longing.
If this is the price of saving his people and the worlds they sustain, I’ll pay it.
I just hope there’s something left of me afterward.
I just have to remember what he told me.
Nothing is as it seems in Nightfall.
Not even matebonds.
Because the moment I forget that?
I’m not sure I make it out at all.
“Milady? It’s time,” Masha interrupts my spiral.
“Okay. Let’s do this.”