Chapter Twenty-Seven
Legend
Knight’s crouched beside me when the world swims back into focus, his palm a hot brand against my shoulder like he’s trying to pin me to the floorboards by heat alone.
“What’s wrong with him?” he snarls at anyone who’ll answer, and the question scrapes along my ribs like a knife hunting bone. “Why are we fine and he’s not?”
“Her.” Creed’s one-word answer has my brows pulling.
Everything hums.
My nose leaks slowly and refuses to stop, the taste of iron and ash now permanent on my tongue. The edges of my vision are fuzzy like burned paper.
“Move,” Silver’s voice reaches me, clean as a scalpel he’ll never have to hold. The court’s golden healer in a shirt that somehow hasn’t collected a single wrinkle in this chaos.
He takes Knight’s place at my side. His hands hover over my face, the air cools, and light threads from his fingertips. Silver on silver, the kind that usually stitches flesh back into obedience.
It touches me, and my body jerks like I’ve been nailed to the ground by a predator’s fangs.
But that’s bullshit, because there is no predator greater than me. Than my brothers.
I grit my teeth, chest convulsing.
The light fizzles, pops, and then dies.
Silver’s jaw tightens. He tries again with a different angle, a deeper tone, and a low hum intended to coax my bones to remember they’re mine.
The magic strokes my broken cartilage. My skin rises against it, fighting back like a beast shackled in fire.
The light gutters out, leaving only the ache and a trickle along my lip of something hot that isn’t blood and is.
“Gods,” Silver breathes. “He’s rejecting it. This should work. Legend, can you feel me at all?”
My eyes narrow and he sits back on his haunches, looking over at my brothers.
Sinner’s sprawled on a small sofa in the back corner, cigarette smoldering between two lazy fingers, smoke drawing sigils of trouble and invitation.
“It’s the bond,” he says around the drag, voice flat, as if stating the weather while the house is on fire.
“He’s wired to her and frayed to hell. You can’t knit a man back together while someone else is unraveling his thread. ”
Bond.
Mate.
Haide.
My insides coil, fire molding my organs together in a painful grip, and I jerk in my place on the floor, body rolling onto my side as my arms flop in front of me.
How the fuck did I end up on the floor? How the fuck did I end up here?
London steps in behind Sinner, shoulder to Knight’s back, steadying him in the way only she can. Her gaze flicks from my face to Silver’s hands to the streak of black on the floor beside me.
“Where is Haide? What happened?”
Everyone ignores me.
Silver drags the back of his wrist across his brow, annoyed at what he does or doesn’t find. “I can seal the break in his nose manually, but the system’s rejecting healing on a deeper level. This is beyond my ability.” He presses two fingers to my throat, counting. “Pulse is…volatile.”
I laugh and it fucking hurts.
I close my eyes and, deep in the recesses of my mind, there’s a spark. It’s sharp and hot and undoubtably her.
Rage.
My little monster is angry, claws turned inward. If I had breath to spare, I’d laugh at the recognition. Of course, my mate’s fury would taste like the edge of a blade that has learned to love its own bite. My bite.
But why is she angry at me?
I try to stand.
“Legend.” Knight’s voice gentles without his permission. “Stay down.”
“Make me.” I plant a hand, then another, and push.
My arms shake like a newborn god trying to stand on legs it hasn’t earned yet.
Silver reaches to steady my shoulder but my skin rejects him again. The contact crackles, the healer yanks back, shaking out singed fingers with a stunned laugh. “He is a terrible patient.”
“Leave me alone. I’ll go to her. She’s what I need.”
“You will go nowhere,” Creed says as if it’s final. As if he is any more a King than I am.
“Don’t make me gut you, brother.”
“You’re too weak to even try.”
“My mate is waiting for me!” I snarl, chest heaving as I tear free and push to my feet. “You can’t keep me from her! You can’t—”
“Don’t you get it, you blind fucking bastard?” Creed slams me back, eyes white fire, words splitting the room in half. “You don’t have a mate, Legend. It isn’t fucking real!”
My muscles lock tight and the room grows dead silent.
My knees buckle before I can stop them. One slams the floor hard enough that I feel bone grind. My hands curl into fists against the boards, nails biting through my palms until they drip. The taste of copper floods my mouth.
“You lie, brother.” It has to be a lie.
Creed’s stare never wavers. “You’re being fooled. Trapped.”
The moment he says it, the bond pulls—hard enough to make my chest ache like it’s splitting down the center. He’s wrong.
I can feel her.
He’s fucking wrong.
“She is my mate.” My jaw snaps, spit and blood stringing the air.
Creed’s gaze dips to the black river running from my nose down my chest. “You’re bleeding into a place none of us can reach. That bond is a noose, not a tether. It’s tightening and it won’t stop until it’s drained you dry.”
“I will end you if you try to keep me from her.” I stagger. My spine groans but I rise, inch by brutal inch, until I’m upright again. My vision blurs, but I don’t look away. “She. Is. Mine.”
“Breathe, Legend.” Knight snarls, restraining me, my body thrashing in his grip. His glare cuts to Creed like it could flay him open. “You. Explain. Now before I help him hurt you.”
Creed slowly shakes his head. “Knight.”
“No,” Knight argues back. “I know the feeling of a partial bond. Of thinking my mate is gone or hurt or that someone dared to take her from me. I felt my Ethos rage. My mind slip and body weaken. I know the power of a mating bond. You don’t.
So start fucking talking, brother, or I’m done hearing about this. ”
“Too much information might—”
“Say it.”
Creed is quiet for too fucking long before he finally speaks.
“Don’t forget what I can do.” Creed leans forward, bringing himself inches from my face, and speaks slowly.
“I’ve been inside your head, brother. I’ve dug every corner of your mind since you brought that girl back here.
I know where you hide things. I’ve walked the corridors you’re too fucking weak to see right now, but I see.
I know. And it is my job to fix this. Fix you. ”
“I am not broken. I am missing half of my god damn soul!” I rage.
“Exactly!” He screams back, shoving to his feet as he looks around. “How do you guys not see it?”
“We can’t fucking read minds,” Knight snaps, and there’s a tremor in it that’s part anger and part bone-deep fear. He’s up in Creed’s face faster than I can blink, like he wants to tear the truth out of him with his bare hands. “Tell us everything.”
Creed straightens, eyes glittering. “I will tell you what you need to know,” he says, calm as a razor. “Not what you want.”
“Fuck that,” Sinner spits, the words like a match. He steps forward, yanking London with him. “Shield us.”
London’s eyes snap to mine before going to her mate’s.
Knight gives a curt nod, and then their lips are moving, but their words become wind in my ears.
There is no sound, just the anger on my brothers’ faces, and the horror that follows.
Every head snaps in my direction.
London’s hand lifts to her mouth, her eyes going wide.
The wind’s whistle disappears with the clear sheen that covered my family.
“You’re lying,” Knight growls, eyes on me.
“I’m not lying.” Creed’s voice is silk over steel. “I am trying to save him. You saw what she did back there. She is getting stronger while he gets weaker!”
“Really?” I cough a laugh. “She saved our asses and you’re blaming her for that?”
Creed crouches before me. “How?” he prompts.
“How did she save us? As far as we know, she’s not supposed to have any true powers, remember?
So if she does, if they manifested or were there from the beginning, she is hiding them.
Why would she do that, Legend? Yet you’re the one who couldn’t even use the ones you were born with the other day.
You can’t portal. You can hardly fucking stand. Why is that?”
I glare and he comes closer.
“When you brought her back here, how did you do it, Legend?”
“Hitched a ride on good old Benny boy,” I mention London’s best friend. “Dragons guard that place, you know.”
“A place where no one is allowed in or out. Yet she can. Think. How else did those soul-eating fucking flowers get here? She brought them. And who knows where else she put them? She was born to exile and when the island lost its anchor, it needed a new one…and then a royal walked its soil for the first time.”
“I went to claim what was given to me by the gods.”
“No. You took something that was never supposed to leave that place, and it took from you in return. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that. She is playing us. That Isle’s Kiss? How else would it have gotten here? Why are these deaths all related to the island…to her?”
“I don’t care.”
“I do!” Creed rages. “She has found some sort of workaround. I know it. And when I figure out how, I will prove it and I will cut that fake bond from your chest before I let it claim you.”
“Watch it.”
“You’re not yourself, Legend. Just fucking think.”
“Stop.”
He grips my head. “Dig deeper!”
“I said stop.”
He presses tight. “Break past that fucking treachery in your mind!”
“Creed.”
“The bond is not real!”
My hands are on Creed’s throat before I even know I’ve moved them, fingers closing like iron traps, nails digging in where the skin is soft under his jaw. He makes a sound halfway between a curse and a laugh, shock sliding off his face, then pain when I clamp down harder.