Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
SOREIA
Idon’t release his wrist.
He doesn’t ask me to.
We stand in the ruins of the shrine—surrounded by death, covered in blood, breathing air thick with old incense and fresh destruction—and neither of us moves. The contact holds. His wrist warm beneath my fingers. My grip on his skin.
The informant’s body lies cooling near the eastern wall. Whatever knowledge he carried died with him. The gods won that round. Eliminated another source, closed another door, forced us further into ignorance.
Anger would be reasonable. The loss of those answers should feel like a wound.
What I feel instead is the certainty that the man beside me would burn the world to cinders to protect me.
Dangerous thought. Stupid thought. True thought.
His head turns farther. Enough now that I see his eyes fully—those impossible eyes that have kept vigil through my darkest hours, tracked my breathing, placed themselves at the center of every danger.
He’s looking at me the way I imagine he looks at prey.
I don’t look away.
“The poison.” My free hand lifts toward the wounds still visible across his arm. “Your healing is struggling.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You shouldn’t have to manage.” My fingers hover over a particularly vicious gash—the edges blackened, the flesh refusing to close properly. “Sit down. Let me look.”
“Soreia—”
“Sit. Down.”
For a moment, I think he’ll refuse. That lethal instinct doesn’t take orders. It dominates or destroys, doesn’t bend or yield.
He sits.
The altar serves as an examination table.
I guide him to the central stone—cracked and stained with residue older than my grandmother—and position him against its surface.
He moves stiffly. The wounds are worse than I first thought.
Divine poison runs through at least six separate injuries, each one fighting his regeneration to a standstill.
“This will hurt.”
I don’t wait for acknowledgment. My magic reaches toward his wounds, searching for the poison’s signature, that wrongness that doesn’t belong in living flesh.
My power isn’t healing. It can’t repair damage or knit flesh. What it can do is anchor—make things permanent, make endings stick. Including, it turns out, the ending of divine corruption.
The poison resists. Divine power fights my bloodline’s authority. For a long moment, it’s a standoff—my power pushing, the poison pushing back, neither giving ground.
Then I push harder.
My hands shake with the effort. My vision narrows to a single point of focus: the wound beneath my fingers, the poison trying to spread, the determination to make it stop.
The poison yields.
I anchor its death the same way I anchor a monster’s—with finality, with authority, with the absolute certainty that this ends now.
It works.
The blackened edges of his wound begin to lighten. His flesh finally starts to knit. The healing that was stalled resumes, accelerated now that the interference is gone.
“Again.” I move to the next wound. “Hold still.”
He holds still.
I clear five wounds before my body betrays me.
The sixth one—a deep gash across his shoulder—pushes past my limits. The Anchor reaches, finds the poison, begins to work... and my knees buckle.
Kaster catches me before I hit the ground.
His arms wrap around me with speed that shouldn’t be possible for someone so recently injured. He pulls me against him, my back to his uninjured side, supporting my weight when my own muscles refuse.
“Enough.” His voice carries warning. Command. “You’re burning yourself.”
“One more.” My vision swims. “The shoulder wound is the worst. If the poison spreads—”
“I’ll heal.”
“Not if it reaches your heart.”
His hold firms. I feel his exhale—quick, uneven, the rhythm of someone fighting a battle I can’t see.
“You’ll kill yourself.”
“Then I’ll kill myself saving you.” The words emerge without permission. Raw and honest in a way that strips me bare. “Better than watching you die slowly because I was too weak to finish.”
Silence.
His pulse thunders against my back. I can feel it through the thin fabric separating our skin—fast, erratic, nothing to do with combat or injury.
“Soreia.”
My name on his lips sounds different than it used to. Heavier. An acknowledgment neither of us has put into words.
“One more wound.” I don’t phrase it as a request. “Then I’ll stop. I promise.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
Then: “One more.”
I clear the shoulder wound.
It nearly kills me.
The poison in that gash is deeper, more entrenched, more determined to spread. My magic battles it for what feels like hours—pushing, anchoring, forcing the wrongness to end. My body screams protest. My vision goes white, then gray, then fades toward oblivion.
But the poison yields.
It dies beneath my hands, anchored into a permanent ending, and his flesh finally begins to heal.
I collapse against him the moment it’s done.
He catches me again.
This time, he doesn’t let go.
He gathers me against his body with possessive certainty. I feel his heart beating against my back—slowing now, steadying, the rhythm of a body finally winning its war against the poison.
“Reckless.” The word rumbles through me, vibration as much as sound. “Suicidal. Fucking stubborn.”
“Accurate.” My voice comes out barely audible. “All three.”
His exhale ghosts across the top of my head. His arms lock around me—not painful, but absolute. The hold of a predator who has decided to keep.
I should pull away. Establish distance. Remember that this alliance is temporary, that survival partnerships don’t require physical contact, that letting him hold me like this means things I’m not prepared to name.
I stay where I am.
I let him hold me instead.
Minutes pass. Maybe hours.
The shrine adjusts around us—stone shifting, debris finding new configurations, the building accommodating its further damage. The light through the collapsed ceiling changes as clouds move across the sun. Shadows lengthen in the alcoves where offerings once burned.
I regain enough strength to sit up on my own.
Kaster doesn’t immediately release me. His arms loosen but don’t withdraw, maintaining contact even as I straighten against the altar’s edge. His heat against my back is a constant presence—not uncomfortable, not unwelcome.
Not unwelcome.
I let that thought exist without examining it.
“The informant.” My voice sounds stronger now. Steadier. “He said the gods see us as potential. That separately we’re manageable, but together...”
“They fear what we might become.”
“Does that change anything? Knowing why they’re hunting us?”
He doesn’t answer for so long that I start to wonder if he’ll answer at all.
“No.” His breath stirs my hair again. “I was going to kill them anyway.”
A sound escapes me—half laugh, half disbelief. “That’s not a strategy.”
“It’s the only strategy that matters.”
I turn my head. Not enough to face him fully—he’s too close for that, our bodies still aligned in ways that should be uncomfortable and aren’t—but enough to see his profile in my peripheral vision.
His features have smoothed. The fury is gone, or at least buried deep enough that it doesn’t show. What remains is focus. Determination. The absolute certainty of someone who has identified his enemy and decided on its ending.
“You can’t kill a god.”
“I can try.”
“And if you fail?”
His arm tightens around me. A minute movement, barely perceptible, but I feel it against my ribs.
“Then I’ll die trying. But so will everything that threatens you.”
We leave the shrine at dusk.
The informant’s body lies where it fell. There’s no time for burial, no resources for a ceremony. Another casualty in a war that started before either of us chose to fight it.
I look back once as we reach the courtyard exit. The shrine looms behind us—vaulted ceilings open to the darkening sky, altar stained with blood, old and new, echoes of forgotten worship twisted into a monument to abandonment by the very gods it once served.
Sacred space made profane.
The gods did this. Created these monsters, destroyed these places, erased anyone who might have helped us understand why.
I turn away.
Kaster walks beside me. His wounds have mostly healed. The poison I cleared is gone. His body moves with the fluid grace I’ve come to associate with safety.
I’m no longer surviving.
The thought arrives with quiet finality as we pass through the shrine’s courtyard, over shattered paving stones, into the fading light of another day we managed not to die.
I keep walking beside him.
His arm grazes mine again. Deliberate this time. A contact that speaks to awareness, to intention, to the same recognition I’m still learning to name.
I don’t pull away.
Neither does he.
We walk into the gathering darkness, and for the first time since this hunt began, I’m not calculating odds of survival.
I’m calculating what I’m willing to risk to keep him alive.
The answer is everything.