Chapter 3 Mourning
MOURNING
Andrik-
Her broken scream still echoes through the trees as she stumbles into the clearing.
Furious.
She's absolutely furious.
My body stills as I listen to her climb closer, every instinct sharpening to a razor’s edge.
Snow settles across my fur weightlessly, but beneath it, my blood roars like a winter storm clawing its way out of my chest. Her voice burns through me, not like fire, but like recognition.
Like something ancient and forgotten has finally shaken itself awake inside me after sleeping for millennia.
She can't see me yet; I haven’t allowed it. But gods, I want her to.
There's a tightness in my throat I don't understand.
It tastes of salt and iron, and a longing so fierce it threatens to bring me to my knees.
My paws are still pressed firmly to the ground, my claws driven deep into the roots beneath his corpse.
They anchor me before I do something foolish. .. like run to her.
She's so close now. I can feel her presence like a thread pulled tight between her chest and mine. It vibrates with every breath she takes, humming beneath my ribs.
Sael?n.
The word licks through me like fire through frost. Sael’thra ves’kael Kaemorin. (You are carved into my ribs and written in my bones. Mine.)
After thousands of years of silence, and snow, and souls that meant nothing. She’s here, screaming in my forest. Furious and broken and kaemorin.
The dead man lies beneath me. His face is frozen in perpetual agony, his eyes empty and staring at nothing. But her scent still clings to him, woven into the fabric of his coat… and that I cannot allow.
That scent belongs to me now.
Lumi-
I stumble into the grove, and that's when I smell it. Blood. The fresh smell of copper floods my nose. My fingers snap to the knife strapped to my thigh as I step forward, my boots suddenly too loud in the silence. My eyes scan the area, settling on a patch of disturbed snow. There are drag marks, there’s a body—
Mark.
He’s dead.
His body lies crumpled in the center of the clearing like a discarded puppet.
His face is frozen in a rictus of terror, his mouth open in a scream that never made it out.
There’s blood. So much blood, staining the crisp white snow around him, but it’s his eyes that stop me cold.
I didn’t think they could look emptier than they already did—I was wrong.
“No.” The word falls from my lips, barely a whisper.
“No, no, no—”
The scream rips straight from my throat before I can stop it, raw enough to tear something vital on its way out.
“He was mine!”
I stumble forward, my knife forgotten as my knees hit the frozen ground beside his body. He was mine to kill. Mine to take. Mine to watch crumble the way Anna did—the way I did when I found her still warm in my bed.
It was supposed to be my eyes he looked into as he took his last breath. My hands around his throat. My voice the last thing he heard. For Anna.
Two years.
Two goddamn years of planning, training, and surviving on nothing but rage and the promise of this moment.
For what?
What do I have to show for it?
A corpse I didn’t make? Closure I’ll never receive? A sister I didn’t get to avenge?
“Fuck!” I scream into the trees, voice cracking in the cold. “Fuckk!” It echoes through the clearing like thunder, bouncing off the trees and dissolving into nothing.
I could've died two years ago. Maybe I should have.
The only thing that kept me tethered to this world was the need to watch the light bleed from Mark O’Reilly’s eyes. And I didn't even get that.
My body shakes so hard I collapse, falling forward into the snow beside him, not caring that it’s drenched and sticky with his blood.
And just like that—I have nothing left.
I don’t know how long I lay here. Long enough for the snow to start falling quietly again.
It settles over me like it’s trying to bury me, too.
My tears don’t even fall anymore; they just freeze as they form in the corner of my eyes.
Numbness starts to creep in—blessed, merciful numbness that swallows the grief and rage and leaves me hollow.
Silence presses in from all sides. And then—a prickling at the base of my skull forces me into awareness.
There’s pressure in the air like I’m not alone.
My body goes rigid. My heart slams behind my sternum, my vision honing in as adrenaline surges through my body.
I shoot up, my hands fumbling around in the dark as I search for my knife.
My eyes scan the tree line, searching for movement, for eyes reflecting moonlight, or anything that might tell me what’s out there, but there’s only shadows dancing between the trees.
I know there’s something out there. I can feel it in my spine, and in the way every instinct inside me screams at me to run.
Maybe it’s an animal drawn to the smell of blood, or maybe… it’s whatever killed Mark.
Andrik-
“He was mine!” Her gut-wrenching screams tear through the forest, and it feels like claws raking down my spine.
Kaemorin.
She called him hers. How? How could a monster like him belong to someone like her?
I prowl low among the brush, watching as she throws herself into the snow beside his corpse. She’s sobbing… grieving for a nightmare that thal?n should have buried themselves.
The bond hums maddeningly in my chest, pulling me toward her even as my mind recoils. After thousands of years, the forest finally delivers her to me… and she’s mourning a murderer.
She loved him. She must have. Why else would she scream like that for him? Does she know what he was? What he’s done?... Did she help him?
The questions consume me, but beneath them, there’s something else.
Want.
Thal?n, help me. I want her anyway. Even covered in blood and grieving another male. Even if she’s everything I should turn away from… I won’t.
I crawl forward, unable to stop myself. Just a little closer.
Her face is pale and tear-streaked. Her lips are trembling, chapped from the cold, or maybe from screaming.
Her long hair spills across the snow like brown ink, and I have to fight every instinct not to reach out and touch it.
She’s kaemorin. The bond screams it with every beat of my heart, even if she doesn’t know it yet.
Listening to her cry for someone else exposes something primal inside me—a snarling, possessive thing I’ve never felt before. Thrak’ven mar?k veyl?n. (I will rip the soul from your bones.)
Even in death, I want to unmake him for touching her. I want to tear what’s left of him apart, so there’s no body for her to cry at.
But I can’t, because she chose him first.
She springs up from the snow, and my entire body falls still.
Her eyes flit from tree to tree, searching for me.
I could reveal myself now. Step from the shadows and claim what the forest says is mine, but first I must understand.
Why him? Why is her soul a locked door when every other opens to me like roots to water?
Ves’tharil neskae. (Her soul is veiled from me.)
My claws retract first, curling into hands that tremble with restraint. My mane smooths back into hair. My spine straightens, bones creak and crack as the transformation finishes. I brace against the pain, but it’s already begun, and resisting only hurts worse.
When it’s done, I stand upright, antlers still crowning my head, eyes still glowing, but less beast than I was.
Something she might not run from.
Almost human.
Almost worthy.
She’s still searching for me, refusing to flee. My fierce little snowdrop.
Even if she never looks at me the way I long to be seen—even if her heart is buried in the frost beside a dead man. I am hers, and I will withstand it. I was built for pain
But she—
She is the only sound the gods have ever given me that doesn’t hurt.