Chapter 35 #2
The sensation is overwhelming. It feels like a tidal wave of molten gold crashing into my hollowed-out chest. My compromised frequency—my fragile, flickering “nothingness”—is forced to align with his. The silver lines beneath us scream with light.
I feel his memories. Not just the ones he told me, but the ones he keeps in the dark. The smell of his mother’s smoke. The weight of his father’s crown. The crushing pain of a man who was betrayed by his own brother.
It feels like our souls are being hammered together by the water’s pressure. A soul-smashing jacuzzi?
“Match him, Esme!” Salome orders. “Find the harmonic. If you fight him, you’ll get caught in between frequencies and shatter!”
But I don’t know how to match him. He’s like a mountain, and I’m a handful of dust. I try to reach for something, anything, in the void of myself that can hold his weight.
Dayn leans forward, his forehead pressing against mine. The contact is an explosion. The pressure builds in my chest, my throat, my spine. My breath stutters and dies like my lungs have forgotten how to work in the face of something so overwhelming.
His presence is everywhere. It’s threaded through the water, soaking into my pores, winding around my bones. It’s impossible to separate “me” from “him.” I can feel the shift of his muscles, the thrum of his heart, the way his very cells seem to vibrate at a frequency that demands my own surrender.
This isn’t just power. It’s a total, absolute invasion.
“I have you,” he whispers, and the thought is like a brand against my mind. “Don’t fight me.”
I feel his control. I feel the staggering scale of what he is—the ancient, predatory beast that sleeps in his blood, the king who would burn the world for his throne, the guardian who would kill to keep what is his. And it is all focused on me.
A realization hits me with the force of a wave: He could take everything.
It feels like he could reach into the hollowed-out shell of my mind and rewrite me in his own image.
He could fill the void of me with his own fire, his own memories, his own will.
He could make me an extension of himself, a moon reflecting only his light, a creature bound to him not by choice, but by the sheer gravitational pull of his soul.
Is this protection? Or is it possession?
The lines blur. I’m slipping. The small, terrified spark of “Esme” that remained is being smothered by the golden roar of his essence.
My thoughts are no longer my own; they’re flickering shadows in the glare of his influence.
I’m losing the edges of my identity. I’m becoming a note in his symphony, a drop in his ocean.
I am almost gone. I am almost him.
“Hold on, my dark thing,” he suddenly whispers.
The water stabilizes, the silver lines turning into solid bars of light. The alignment is nearly perfect. He has total control. He could lock the door right now. He could seal me into his frequency forever, and I would be safe. I would be whole, in a way. I would be his.
But then, I feel it.
A hesitation. A ripple in the overwhelming heat.
Dayn feels the moment I start to disappear.
He feels the way my soul is beginning to fray at the edges, the way I am ready to succumb and become nothing more than his shadow.
He has me. He has the “leverage” the clearbloods wanted.
He has the Salem witch, the key to the Ides, the woman he claims to want.
And yet he doesn’t keep me.
Just as the pressure reaches the breaking point, just as the final wall of my identity begins to crumble, he pulls back.
Not all the way. Not so much that the connection breaks. But he recedes, withdrawing the invasive, crushing weight of his will. He carves out a space in the resonance, a hollow just for me.
The pressure recedes like a falling tide. The water in the basin calms, the violent vibration settling into a lower, steadier thrum.
My identity snaps back into place with a jolt that steals my breath.
I am… Esme, again. I am the woman who was hollowed out, the witch who was lost. But now I feel…
changed. I still carry his resonance—it’s a layer of heat beneath my skin, a frequency humming in the back of my mind—but it’s no longer a replacement for my own.
It feels like a… shield. A harmonic overlay that sits over my soul. Like armor?
Shielding me from Esther?
I blink, my vision finally clearing. The sight of Dayn inches in front of me hits me harder than the magic did. His amber eyes are dark with a raw vulnerability I’ve never seen, his chest heaving as if he’s the one who was almost unmade.
He didn’t keep me. The thought settles. He didn’t keep me—even when it would have been easy.
Even when it probably would have worked better for whatever plans he has, to have me fully under his thumb.
In that void, I was a blank slate, and he was a god.
He could have filled the hollow parts of my soul with his own will, done whatever he wanted with me, and I probably would’ve loved him for it because I wouldn’t have known how to do anything else.
But he didn’t. He reached into the abyss and pulled me out, then stepped back to give me air.
“Why?” I rasp.
Dayn meets my gaze. His hands tighten around mine under the water, still grounding me.
“Why what?” His voice is barely less raspy.
“Why d’you just… make that so easy?” I struggle to form a more coherent question. He seems to understand.
There’s a beat as his eyes continue to bore into me. “I already told you,” he finally says. “I don’t want a shadow, or a reflection.” His grip on me shifts, firmer. “I want you.”
The honesty in his tone is a different kind of violence.
It pierces through the lingering numbness, sparking a heat in that hollow chamber of my chest that has nothing to do with ritual conduction.
For the first time since Esther messed with my spirit, I feel a flicker of something real—a sharp, unsteady, almost painful thing.
My fingers tighten around his without thinking.
“Dayn,” I breathe. What have you… done to me? Or what have I… let myself do?
The coldness inside me—that thin, cool veil Esther left behind—feels like it’s drowning.
In its place, a wave of something hot and terrifyingly raw crashes through the center of me.
Not magic. It’s the way my heart suddenly hurts against my ribs, an unfamiliar, pulsing ache that feels foreign yet somehow belongs to the man holding my hands.
I suddenly feel the weight of every look he’s given me, every brush of his skin, every utterance of my name, as if they’ve all been waiting for this exact moment to land.
Not slide off. Not blur into that dull, distant nothing. Land. Each one slots into place with unsettling clarity—the way his gaze lingers too long, the way his voice shifts when he says my name, the way he stands just a fraction too close, like distance is something he tolerates, not prefers.
I feel all of it now. And worse, I feel what it does to me.
My breath catches, uneven. Yet I don’t pull my hands away.
The water between us has gone still again, but our connection hasn’t. It hums—low, steady, threaded through my chest.
Dayn doesn’t move either. His gaze flicks over my face, slower this time, taking me in.
His gaze dips, briefly, to my mouth. The shift is subtle but arrests my entire attention.
For a second, the world narrows to just that thin, charged space between us.
No ritual. No Salome. No looming catastrophe.
Just this.
Just him.
Just the fact that I don’t think I would resist if he—
“Touching,” Salome’s voice cracks through the silence like a whip. “But unless you want to leave here with an unfinished ritual, I suggest you save the epiphany for later.”
I blink, the moment breaking as I look toward the edge of the basin. Salome’s standing with her arms crossed, her shrewd blue eyes reflecting the glimmering water.
“There’s a final phase,” Salome continues. “Stabilization. Otherwise, what you’ve just accomplished will not hold.”
Her hand hovers over the water’s surface, and I see something change in her demeanor. The detached observer goes, replaced by something sharper and more focused. She rolls up her sleeves, revealing forearms etched with the same subtle silver runes that mark her face.
“This is where my real work begins,” she says.
Before I can ask what that means, she plunges her hands into the water.
The moment they break the surface, the liquid itself seems to recognize her, rippling outward from her touch.
The silver lines beneath the surface pulse in greeting, their glow intensifying.
Then they begin weaving through the water, back toward me.
I look at Dayn, and he nods, providing reassurance that this is expected, part of the plan. I let out a breath and move back slightly, letting the silver lines target me.
They reach my legs first, wrapping around my ankles in a grip that’s neither painful nor gentle, just absolute. The sensation crawls upward, those threads of light sliding along my calves, my thighs, my waist.
“Good,” Salome murmurs, her eyes half-closed in concentration. “Your own frequency is stabilizing.”
The threads continue their ascent, weaving a cocoon of silver light around my torso, my shoulders, my neck.
I can feel them sinking deeper, no longer just touching my skin but somehow passing through it, finding the channels where my magic flows.
They’re not invasive like Dayn’s power was.
They don’t seek to replace. Instead, they feel like.
.. scaffolding. Support structures being built around the essence of who I am.
Salome’s fingers dance beneath the water, conducting the threads with subtle movements. “Your grandmother’s work was thorough,” she observes clinically. “She didn’t just suppress your deeper emotions. She tried to reroute your entire spiritual frequency.”