Bonus Chapter
Chapter Nineteen - Xander
It was dark.
The kind of dark that didn’t just surround a person, but settled inside them, heavy and suffocating, until they forgot light had ever existed. The kind that seeped so deeply into a person that the line between their own thoughts and the shadows around them blurred.
He felt her there in that darkness. Felt the pain she tried so hard to hide. He had seen more in her mind than she ever meant to show him—the weight she carried, the scars that refused to heal, the person she was beneath the bravado and the blade.
He saw her. Truly saw her.
Not the weapon the King had shaped, but the woman she might have been without his hand twisting her fate.
And despite everything she had endured, despite the thorns of her past, there was something disarmingly soft at her core.
As if life had tried again and again to harden her, to sharpen her into something cruel…
but the edges never held. They bent. They wilted.
Not from weakness, but from a grief too deep to turn into anger.
The steel of her soul had rounded, becoming something he could hold onto.
She noticed him watching her in the dark, trying to make sense of the feelings he had for her. Her eye was swollen shut, her scars speaking louder than any words. She had been knocked down more times than she could count, and still she rose, driven by a resolve that refused to die.
His heart split open when he saw her like that—manacles biting into her wrists, the cold damp clinging to her skin, the story of her suffering carved into every line of her body. She wouldn’t let him heal her, but she allowed him to take the pain away.
When he did, heat tore through his chest, sharp and relentless. Each pulse echoing the agony she had carried alone. His jaw locked, sweat sliding down his temple as he forced himself to stay silent, letting her pain burn through him.
He didn’t tell her the truth—that pain, like energy, couldn’t be destroyed. That to ease her suffering, he had to give it a new home.
He took it. Some of it, at least.
In him, it would fade quickly. His body was whole; the agony would last minutes, not years. But even so, each heartbeat carried a shadow of what she had endured.
And in that moment, he understood something with absolute clarity:
He would take all of it—every wound, every ache, every memory—if it meant she might one day live without it.