Chapter 3
Wolfe
“Where the Heart Binds”
The world held its breath and waited for me to break.
But how much more could I shatter?
I already existed in fragments.
I wasn’t whole here.
Not in this endless expanse of muted gray and nothingness.
My thoughts fractured before they finished forming, and my body came apart and reassembled in slow, merciless cycles, as if fate couldn’t decide what to do with me.
Splinters of myself hovered, barely held together. I formed. I unraveled. Over and over and over.
My body hung suspended in the grayness, half-kneeling, half-tilted forward, as if I were caught in the moment between collapse and rebirth, forced to relive it without the mercy of completion.
I existed in the pause before pain resolved. Before death finished its work.
Was I dead?
Was I alive?
I didn’t know.
Questions swirled in my mind for what felt like centuries, and I had no idea where
I was. Or what I was.
Was I still Fae? Or had the deathwalker powers taken me?
If I was still alive, what kept me living?
Was it the curse?
Or her?
My mage. Elariya.
My Ziyka.
What became of her?
The space around me breathed, thick and heavy, like smoke that refused to disperse. It pressed against my skin and slid through me, carrying the faint impressions of things that no longer lived. Faces flickered at the edges of my vision.
Dead things.
Souls, maybe.
Or memories ripped loose and left to rot.
Mouths frozen mid-scream. Eyes clouded and empty, watching me with the patience of the dead.
I tried to draw breath, but the attempt tore me apart again.
Then I remembered the steel sword buried in my heart, blackened, ancient, fused to bone and sinew as if it had grown there.
Thayden.
Motherfucking bastard.
But look. He’d gotten one over on me.
His sword anchored me to this place, and I couldn’t rip it free. It seemed I existed here because it wanted me to.
More hollow-eyed faces floated past me.
A few stared at me with recognition that curdled in my gut. They drifted in slow orbits, whispering without sound. Their expressions shifted as they passed, pleading, accusing, mocking.
You failed.
You left us.
You deserve this.
I snarled and reached for the sword.
My hands closed around the hilt, and the blade pulsed, but my fingers splintered and my vision shattered.
Then a laugh echoed.
Soft.
Feminine.
Familiar.
Through the pain, I looked up just as a figure stepped out of the gray like a stain bleeding through cloth.
Zyrra. My dead sister.
But this thing that wore her face wasn’t her. I didn’t know what it was or if I’d ever get answers.
Her form shimmered, half-solid, half-shadow, as if she existed here only because this place allowed it. Her long black hair drifted around her face in a weightless halo.
Bright blue eyes that mirrored my own stared back at me with cruel delight.
I’d hoped I was seeing things, but that smile told me I wasn’t.
“Well, look at this,” she murmured, circling me. “You’re still holding on, dear brother.”
I bared my teeth. “Get out. You are not her.”
She laughed again, pleased. “Oh, brother. What makes you think that? I am Zyrra Nightblade.”
“Get away from me!”
“You aren’t in any position to make those types of demands.” She reached out and pressed two fingers to the sword’s pommel.
Pain detonated through me, and I cried out.
The faces around me screamed, silent and wide-mouthed, their agony vibrating through the grayness like a bell struck too hard.
“You should’ve given her to us,” Zyrra scoffed, her lips curling. “Now look at you. Useless. The great Wolfe Nightblade, heir to the kingdom of Galaythia. Useless and all alone.”
Blood filled my mouth. I tasted iron and ruin.
“No,” I rasped.
Her smile sharpened. “Always were so damn stubborn. You won’t even allow death to take you.”
“Get the fuck away from me.”
“Die, die now.” With a radiant smile, she placed her palm flat against the sword.
And pushed.
I roared.
The blade drove deeper, and my body convulsed. The gray space shuddered, the faces scattering like ash on a wind that didn’t exist.
The sword pulsed, and the grayness tore me apart and stitched me back together in its cruel, endless cycle.
And through it all, through the breaking and reforming, through the faces and the pain, I held on to one thing.
My mage.
When the maddening pain eased, the name I’d given her, the one only I called her, slipped from me again and again.
“Ziyka.”
“Ziyka.”
“Ziyka…”
My voice fractured, but I kept reaching for her through every broken word.
If this was living… I would endure it.
I would fight my way back to her.
I would not die here.