Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
SOREIA
Footsteps. Heavy. Irregular. The sound of someone running on damaged legs through an ice-slicked passage.
Kaster drops to his knees beside me. His hands find my face, my shoulders, the wound that’s still spreading poison through my system. His touch carries a frantic urgency—searching, desperate, as if he could find the poison and tear it out the way he tears apart monsters.
“Soreia.”
His voice cracks on my name. Breaks apart, like the sound was torn from him against his will, like my name became a wound in his throat.
I try to respond. My mouth refuses the command. My lungs don’t have enough air. The muscles that should shape words have forgotten how to function.
“Stay with me.” His hands cup my face, force my fading gaze to meet his. “Soreia. Stay.”
I can’t.
The words won’t come. My body has started shutting down—systematic failure cascading from my poisoned blood into my organs, my muscles, my ability to control my own responses.
But I can move my hand.
I reach for him.
My fingers find his wrist. The pulse there—strong, steady, alive in a way I’m no longer certain I can match. The beat of his heart transfers through skin and bone into my dimming awareness.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I don’t reach for rescue. I know what this poison does. I’ve heard the stories, passed down through generations of witches who understood the gods would eventually find ways to destroy them. Once the toxin enters an Anchor’s blood, the magic dies. And when the magic dies, so does the witch.
There is no saving me.
But I can touch him. Can feel his skin against mine in these last moments. Can know that I’m not dying alone in a frozen canyon with no one to notice my ending, no one to remember that I existed, no one to—
He’s here.
The relief that floods through me has no logic to it. Dying is still dying. The poison is still killing me. The creature might return at any moment to finish what it started.
But the terror that has lurked beneath my pragmatic acceptance—the primal fear of facing oblivion alone, of ending without witness, of disappearing into the dark with no hand to hold—releases its grip.
I’m not alone.
He’s here.
“No.” Kaster’s voice is raw. Shattered. “No. You don’t get to do this.”
His hands move to the wound on my shoulder. Press against it as if pressure could stop the poison that’s already spread through every inch of me, every vein and artery, every cell that my bloodline magic used to inhabit.
“Soreia. Look at me.”
I try. My eyes won’t focus. The world has gone gray and soft, all hard edges dissolving into gentle darkness that promises peace, promises an end to the pain and the cold and the constant pressure of survival.
“I need you to stay.” The words come out harsh. Demanding. Exactly like him—commands instead of requests, orders instead of pleas. “Do you understand? I need—”
His voice breaks again.
He doesn’t finish the sentence.
He doesn’t have to.
The Anchor makes one last attempt.
I feel it surge—a desperate, dying push against the poison that’s destroying it. The anchor power that has been my burden and my purpose, my gift and my curse, claws for survival with everything it has left.
For a moment—one brilliant, agonizing moment—it succeeds.
The world snaps into focus. Kaster’s face above mine, streaked with blood and soot and an expression stripped of every mask he’s worn. His eyes are wild. Uncontrolled.
The fear I’d glimpsed in the ravine is fully unleashed now. No composure left. No denial.
“There is one way.” His voice strips everything else away. “A mating bond. My fire into your blood—it burns out the poison. Saves you.” His grip tightens. “But it’s permanent. You’d be bound to me. It can’t be undone.”
I look at him. The fear in his face. What it costs him to ask.
“Do it.” Each word is drawn from the last reserve I have.
“Soreia—”
“I know what it means.” My fingers find his wrist. His pulse against mine, steady where mine is not. “I’m choosing it.”
The fear in his eyes doesn’t vanish. But something beneath it settles.
Even as the power fails, even as the poison presses its advantage—that choice roots itself in the space between heartbeats that are growing further and further apart.
He heard me. That’s all that matters.
“Kaster.” His name escapes my lips. Barely a whisper. A breath shaped into syllables that might not even be audible.
His grip on me tightens. “I’m here.”
“I know.”
My fingers are still wrapped around his wrist. I don’t have the strength to squeeze, but I don’t let go either. This contact—skin against skin, his pulse beneath my fingertips—is the only thing keeping me tethered to a consciousness that’s rapidly slipping away.
“The dreams,” I manage. Each word costs more than the last, scraped from the bottom of an empty well. “They showed me this.”
His expression twists. “Don’t.”
“This is how it ends.”
“Shut up.” The words are vicious. Desperate. Furious in a way that has nothing to do with anger and everything to do with grief he won’t acknowledge. “Shut up and stay alive.”
I want to laugh. Want to tell him that demands don’t work on dying bodies, that his commanding tone won’t convince my organs to keep functioning, that all the dragon fire in the world can’t burn poison out of blood.
I don’t have breath for laughter.
I only have breath for one more truth.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
The words come out broken. Fragmentary. Barely audible over the distant sounds of ice cracking and the creature’s retreating screams and the thunder of my own failing heartbeat.
But he hears them.
I see it in the way his whole body goes rigid. The way his hands tremble against my face—hands that have killed without hesitation, that have torn through monsters and obstacles and anything that stood between him and what he wanted. Trembling now. For me.
“Soreia—”
“I didn’t want to die alone.” The confession spills out without my permission. “I thought I did. Thought I could face it like I’ve faced everything else. Clear-headed. Without sentiment. No weakness.”
My voice gives out. I force it to work for a few more sentences, drag the words from lungs that are forgetting how to function.
“But when it came down to it, I wanted—”
You.
I don’t say the word. Can’t say the word. My body has surrendered to the poison.
But he knows.
His face tells me he knows.
His roar shakes the canyon.
Not rage this time—agony. Pure, unfiltered anguish torn from a creature that has probably never allowed himself to feel this much, never permitted this depth of devastation, never let anyone near enough to leave this kind of wound.
The sound echoes off ice and stone. Reverberates through the cramped passage. Fills every inch of the frozen space with his desperation, his denial, his refusal to accept what’s happening.
I feel it against my skin. Through my bones. In the slowing chambers of my heart that are beating slower, slower, slower.
He pulls me against him. Cradles my dying body in arms that have killed gods’ servants and torn monsters apart. His heat is a memory of warmth that can’t reach me anymore—my body has gone too cold, too far gone for his fire to help.
“Don’t.” His voice breaks on the word. Shatters completely. “Don’t leave.”
I’m not leaving. I’m being taken.
The distinction matters. Would matter, if I could say it. Would matter, if I had the breath to explain that I would stay if staying were an option, that I would fight if fighting could change anything.
But the poison has won. The magic is dead. And my body is following.
My eyes drift closed. The effort of keeping them open has become too much.
Darkness.
Comfortable. Welcoming. The absence of pain and cold and the constant pressure of survival that has defined every moment since I first understood what my bloodline meant.
I could let go. Could slip into the nothing that waits beyond consciousness and let the poison finish what it started.
Easy.
Easier than fighting. Easier than struggling against an ending that was always inevitable. The dreams showed me this moment for a reason. Prepared me for a death I couldn’t escape no matter what choices I made.
Dying in a frozen canyon with a dragon holding my body like I’m the precious thing. The irreplaceable thing. The thing worth roaring for, worth breaking for.
There are worse ways to go.
But his heartbeat won’t let me surrender completely.
I feel it through the layers of his ruined body—that strong, steady rhythm drumming against my ear where my head rests against his torso.
Alive.
He’s alive. Fighting to keep me that way, even though there’s nothing his fire can burn to save me.
The poison doesn’t care about his heartbeat. My body doesn’t care about his desperation.
But I care.
I care that he’s here. That he came for me, again and again, even when it cost him pieces of himself he’ll never get back. I care that the coldest, most controlled predator I’ve ever met is falling apart because I’m dying in his arms.
I care.
And caring is the last thing I feel before the darkness takes me completely.
His voice follows me into the nothing.
“Soreia. Stay with me. Stay. I’ll find a way. I’ll—”
The words fragment. Scatter. Lose meaning as my consciousness dissolves.
But beneath them—carried on the current of his breath and his heat and his desperate grip—is an intensity that has no name. A need that transcends language or logic or the careful walls we’ve both built around ourselves.
I fall into the dark holding onto that.
Holding onto him.
And somewhere in the space between dying and dead, I hear him say my name one more time.
Not a command.
A plea.
The darkness is complete.
I am dying.
And the last thing I know—the last truth that remains as everything else fades into the nothing—is that I’m not alone.
He’s here.
He stayed.
The cold closes in. The world goes silent.
But his arms don’t let go.
And neither do I.