Chapter 42
Lumi POV-
He scoops me into his lap and tilts my chin until our eyes lock. “Lumi,” he breathes, voice shaking uncontrollably. “I need you to understand what we’re dealing with.”
His eyes glow with a terrifying intensity, but the light is fractured—distorted like sunlight flickering at the bottom of a restless pool. I might not sense things the same way he does... but I can feel his terror as if it’s my own.
“Rhavari bonds aren’t like human marriages,” he chokes out. “They aren’t vows you can break or annul. They’re woven into our souls by the Gods themselves.”
He reaches for my left hand, absently tracing the opalescent stone with a single claw.
“When we complete the bond, our souls will be tied together. Forever. Across lifetimes.”
I open my mouth to respond, but he pushes forward with urgency.
“But there are laws. Sacred laws that even the Gods cannot bend.”
His grip tightens slightly.
“If another male claims you before the bond is sealed—” He swallows hard. “The bond doesn't just break, Lumi. It shatters. Like ice struck with a hammer.”
I stare at him, trying to hide my mortification.
“And when a Rhavari bond shatters...” His voice falters. “The one left behind doesn’t just grieve. They go feral.”
His trembling hands slide up my back.
“First, the madness comes,” he whispers. “You forget your name. Forget who you are. You hunt endlessly for something you can't find—because it no longer exists—ripped jaggedly from your soul.”
He jerks his hands away when he notices his claws pricking my skin.
“Next, the blood hunger sets in. You slaughter anything that breathes. Not for food. Not for survival. Just because the bond is screaming and you can't make it stop.”
His head bows, but I don’t miss the tears falling onto his lap.
“Eventually...” He takes a ragged breath. “Your heart just... stops. Without the bond holding the pieces together, you unravel, bit by bit, until all that’s left is snow and silence.”
The air around us thickens with the weight of his confession. The fire crackling softly is the only sound between us.
“That’s why I can’t claim you yet, kaelthra’sael. Not while he’s still out there. Not while there’s even the smallest chance he could—” (My fated one.)
He can’t bring himself to finish the sentence. “If he enters you,” he rasps, “if he takes you before I can complete the bond—” A tear slips down his cheek.
“I’ll lose you in this life and every one after.” His voice cracks. “And Lumi, I will spend whatever’s left of my existence tearing this world apart until my heart stops beating.”
I feel sick—the image of Andrik, hollow-eyed and blood-soaked, hunting through the snow for a bond that no longer exists, is too much.
Forgetting my face.
Forgetting my name.
Dying alone because I was taken from him.
“Then we end this,” I promise, cupping his face and forcing him to look at me. “We find him. We stop him. And then you claim me the way the Gods intended.”
He hauls me flush against his chest, his arms wrapping snugly around my waist. One hand curls into the hair at my nape, forcing my head back, while the other splays across my lower back, crushing me into him until the air leaves my lungs.
He buries his face into the hollow of my shoulder, his entire body shudders as he inhales me—not as a lover, but as a man who was drowning and just found his breath.
His frantic heartbeat pounds beneath my ear.
“I will end him, Sael?n. I swear it on every star that watches us.”
He exhales shakily, planting kisses down the side of my neck.
When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against mine. We sit there in the silence, breathing the same air, trying to convince ourselves that we still have time.
I curl into his chest as his fingers thread through my hair.
My eyes start to droop as his voice rumbles soft whispers into my hair.
“Thraen’na. Kael’vasra, luvieth.” (Rest safely. I will protect you, always.)
He nuzzles my neck.
“Nocthae ves kael?n. Nai’thar ves l?r lumina’ka.” (The night will not touch you. I am here, little light.)
“Lumina’ka ves nai’thar,” I whisper back. (Your little light is here.)
I want to say more, but sleep pulls at me—my body exhausted, my soul bruised.
His arms tighten around me, and I'm finally safe enough to let go.
Snow falls, but I’m not in his forest.
I’m on some kind of... battlefield. The ground beneath my feet isn’t frozen; it’s scorched. Ash drifts from a bruised sky, mingling with the falling flurries until the world is a kaleidoscope of grey and white.
A woman runs past me, her feet bare and bloodied against the black earth. Her breaths come out in sharp, desperate bursts—the sound of someone who’s already run miles, with many left to go.
“Hello?” I call out, but my voice is swallowed by the heavy, muffled silence of fallout. She doesn’t stop. It’s like I’m a ghost haunting her memory.
In the distance, a monolith of white stone pierces through the smog. A temple? A castle?
What is she running from?
A man's voice rings out, splitting the silence.
“Naya!”
I spin, searching through the haze. A man sprints by, so close the heat of his skin brushes my shoulder. He’s tall, beautiful in an almost ethereal way. Streaked with warpaint the color of dried blood, his face is a mask of panicked agony.
He’s screaming. The words sound like they’re being ripped from his soul.
“Naya, don’t! Please.”
The air turns bitterly cold. A second figure emerges from the smoke. He is a mirror image of the first, but something’s off. Where the first man was fire and warpaint, this one is shadow and silence. He stands perfectly still amid the chaos.
“Caelen,” she shrieks.
Standing in the mouth of a dark grove is a figure that doesn’t belong to this era. He is encased in heavy, ancient armor. He doesn’t move. He simply stands there watching the tragedy unfold. A faint metallic clink catches my ear. I can feel his gaze through the narrow slit of his visor.
“Wait!” I scream.
I run after them, my feet hit the scorched earth with heavy thuds. The faster I run, the more the world begins to warp. The ash turns into thick, silver mist; the smell of burnt cedar shifts into the sharp, clean scent of fresh water.
The knight doesn’t move as I pass him, but the metallic clink of his suit rings out like a funeral bell.
“Not yet, Lumi,” a voice whispers directly into my mind. It sounds like stones grinding against each other.
I’m so close to the man wearing the warpaint. I put everything I have into my next few steps. My fingers graze his back, but the second I touch him, he shatters into a thousand shards of ice.
The ground falls away. The sky collapses.
“Come back to me, Naya.”
I gasp. The sensation of falling is replaced by the sudden, heavy pressure of water against my skin. My eyes snap open. I’m not on a battlefield, I’m in Andrik’s bed, wrapped in his arms.
“Come back to me, Lumi,” he whispers. “I’m right here. You’re okay. You’re safe.”
“I had this dream, Andrik—there was a woman and a battlefield. A knight, a literal knight in shining armor.”
“A nightmare,” he murmurs, stroking my hair. “Maybe from the fever—”
“No.” I pull back slightly. “It felt real. Like a memory that wasn’t mine.”
“I believe you, ael’soryn.” He lowers his antlers. “Tell me about it. What happened in this dream?”
“I don’t know. There was this woman running barefoot through the woods.
Two identical men were chasing after her.
The first one kept screaming ‘Naya,’ over and over again.
” I shake my head in confusion. “She called him Caelen, and I don’t know why, Andrik, but hearing those names makes me feel like I’m drowning. ”
Something flickers across his face, pain maybe? It’s gone before I can name it.
“Just a dream,” he says quietly. But his arms tighten around me.
I rest my head against his chest, trying to slow my heartbeat.
The names echo in my skull over and over, like pieces of a puzzle I should know how to solve, but the edges are blurring and melting before I can lock them into place.
Andrik’s breathing shifts. I glance up, but he hushes me back against his chest. His lips brush against my forehead. “Sleep, Lumi. I’ve got you.”
I let my eyes close, but the names keep spinning behind them on an endless loop.
The witness POV-
The cottage is perfect now. Every detail is exactly how it should be. For her.
I step back, surveying the room with a critical eye. The bed is made with the fresh linens I took from her apartment—the ones that still carry the faint scent of her laundry detergent.
Her favorite candles line the windowsills. Lavender and rose petals are scattered across the pillows in a pattern so precise it looks grown rather than placed.
She’ll finally see how much I care. She’ll see that while he offered her a cage of ice, I built her a sanctuary of home.
I adjust the curtains for the third time, making sure they hang evenly. Everything must be perfect. She deserves nothing less than a masterpiece.
I move to the small table by the window, my pulse jumps as my fingers trail over the items I’ve collected. A ribbon she dropped in the snow. A pressed flower from the path she always walked home from work. The sketch I drew of her sleeping.
Once the elixir is complete. Once she’s in my arms. He’ll be nothing but a memory, and she’ll see that I was the one who truly loved her all along.
I cross to the far wall where the shadows grow long and heavy. My ritual space. A low table draped in black cloth. Candles arranged in a perfect circle—a solar system with her at the center. I kneel, examining each component with the steady hand of a surgeon.
One pair of vampire bat fangs, harvested under a new moon. They represent hunger—the right kind. Not the beast’s gluttony, but the craving that drives a man to cross worlds.
Fire-glass powder, shimmering like trapped embers. It represents the fever that has consumed her since he walked into her life. This will cool it. Redirect the heat until she burns only for the truth.
Black thorn sap, thick as clotted blood. It severs connections. It will act as the scythe that cuts the ties he‘s tried to knot around her soul.
Spine oil from a drowned moth. I spent weeks hunting for it—a delicate creature that mistook the reflection of the moon for the moon itself. It represents transformation. The death of the girl who fled, so the woman who stays can be born.
Bloodroot steeped in obsidian water. Toxic in its raw state, but once purified, it reveals the truth beneath the illusion. It will peel back the lies Andrik has layered over her eyes.
Lust-vein nectar. It redirects desire, turning the heart’s compass toward its true north. Toward me.
And finally, the jawbone. I lift it carefully, feeling the porous weight of it in my palm. A stag that died defending its territory—its mate—just like I’m about to.
He doesn’t understand. He thinks because some forest spirit whispered her name, she belongs to him. But I’ve earned her. I’ve watched over her. Cared for her from the shadows. I was the one who held her spirit together when Anna died.
I arrange the ingredients, checking the placement one last time. The blood moon rises tonight. The timing must be perfect or all of this was for nothing.
I’ve read the texts a hundred times. Memorized every line of the ritual. Practiced the words until they flow like water.
From here, I can just barely make out the shape of his cabin. She’s there now, with him, for the very last time.
I press the earpiece connected to the contact mic deeper into my ear. Static. Then the muffled, splashing sound of water. My jaw ticks, bitter jealousy spreading through my chest. I pull the earpiece out and toss it on the floor.
It reminds me of being little. Hiding in the closet with my brother while our father entertained whatever woman he’d convinced to come home with him that week.
I’d cover my brother’s ears and hum until I drowned out her screams. I’d tell him stories about heroes and princes until the sounds finally stopped.
Sometimes that meant we were stuck in there, huddled together, until the next day.
They always came back. No matter how badly he hurt them, they always came back.
“That’s how you get a real woman’s love,” my father would say, nursing his bruised knuckles. “The kind that doesn‘t let go.”
I could never hurt Lumi like that. I am the prince from my stories. I will be the hero who keeps her from falling.