Chapter 39 Ezekial
Irip myself from Prospero’s mind, gasping.
They’ve all seen it, all of them, I shared Prospero’s memory without thought, and now they know.
They all know what I did.
“Kacey, ask what you need to.” Jasmine’s voice, just like in that memory, is so soft.
I feel her moving closer, lowering herself beside me. How can she bear to be near me?
“Ezekial…” Her voice is so gentle.
I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve her kindness. Her presence.
I don’t deserve any of it. I don’t deserve her.
I submit to the dark, plunging into the realm, swallowed by pitch-black nothing as I drop to my knees. No shapes. No echoes. Nothing.
Until she follows.
I close my eyes. I don’t deserve to look at her.
“How did I not know?” My voice trembles. “How could I risk your life like that?” My throat burns. “I marked you with an ancient rune. I could have killed you.”
Jasmine’s fingers brush my shoulder.
I should pull away. A better man would, but I am not a good man.
“We were already b—” I can’t finish it. Can’t face it.
“Bonded.” The moment she says it, something shifts, and the others descend into the dark with us.
“I… I was going to put you in the Pit.” Sai drops to his knees, shame and disgust dripping from his words. “I’ll never… I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I was going to kill you.” Julien’s voice is so hollow. “I remember thinking I could snap your neck—” A broken sound slips from his lips. He mutters something low, and sombre, a foreign murmur.
One even I don’t recognise.
“How...” Kane murmurs. Just that one word, but we all know what he’s asking.
“Bonding doesn’t just happen,” Julien says, voice hoarse. “It takes a moment. A choice. Intimacy.” He swallows. “But for us…”
Jasmine’s fingers find mine on the cold, hard ground. “For us, it was The Divide.” Her words drop like rubble into dark, bottomless water—and the ripples shatter us.
Julien bows his head, defeated. “It’s been there all along. That pull. I thought it was just my beast…”
Sai lets out a sharp breath, bordering a laugh, but there’s no humour, only self-loathing. “That fucking ache—” His jaw clenches.
“That’s when it happened,” Kane breathes.
Julien nods slowly. “Inside The Divide, the chaotic realm, when we should’ve died, that was the moment…”
“We bonded,” this time, I say it. And it’s agonising.
All this time, the bond has been buried, because of me.
I’ve lived for centuries, and she’s been out there, without us. For how long? Five years is all she knows, but the memory was before that. What was her life before we bonded—
“You made the right choice.”
I flinch, then stare up at her, stunned, horrified, by how certain she sounds.
“You all made the right choice,” she repeats, strong and sure.
My stomach lurches. “How can you say that?”
“Kane was dying,” she says simply. “You all were. My life wasn’t worth the four of yours.” Then her gaze hardens, her tone turning bitter. “I was the enemy.”
I shake my head.
No. She’s mine. Ours.
She stares into the shadows. “You were right to consider putting me in the Pit.”
Sai emits a low, broken sound.
“Or killing me.”
Julien’s hisses through his teeth.
“You can’t deny that.” She looks at us all. “And we can’t deny what we all saw. I was wearing their cloak.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you were wearing,” I snap, shadows bursting from my clenched fists.
“You were running. They were chasing you, attacking you. No. You fled for a reason, and instead of helping you, I marked you with a deadly rune.” I feel sick.
“We thought about torturing you. Killing you. And then I… I erased your memories.” My voice cracks. “I made you forget everything.”
“You gave me mercy.” Her voice is so calm, so resolute. “You made the right choice, Ezekial.”
“I am the reason you were alone for five years.”
“You are the reason I lived for five more.” Her gaze blazes.
I shut my eyes again, refusing to accept her absolution.
Soft fingers thread through mine, and everything stills. I look down at our hands, then up at Jasmine on her knees before me, the woman I almost lost.
An eternity, without her.
My bonded.
And it’s all my fault. I can’t blame anyone else.
“I ordered the rune.” My words are a pitiful whisper. My order. My choice. “I erased all your memories. I erased our memories of you.” All my decisions. “I could have killed you.”
“You saved your brother.” Her voice is sharp, gaze fierce, grip unshakeable. “No matter what you know now, no matter what any of you said or did, saving Kane was the right choice.” Her darkness curls along my arm. “That was always the right choice.”
“I took your life away.”
“No.” Her eyes glow, bright enough to burn. “You gave me a new life. Another chance. You gave me a gift, Ezekial.”
Then she seeks out the others, my unit, my brothers in so much more than blood.
“Sai,” she says softly, “it didn’t happen.”
He lets out a horrible, choking sound. “But I thought about it, that’s enough. Just imagining you there…” His fist slams into the ground, rupturing it. “What I might’ve done to you… what I’ve done to others—”
He can’t look at her.
Neither can Julien.
“I remember it so vividly,” he murmurs, lost. “Like it would be nothing.” The realm shakes. “Like you were nothing.” The ruptures widen. “My fingers touched your throat—” He stares at his hand in horror.
“Listen to me,” Jasmine commands, rising to her feet.
The darkness wraps her like a mantle, settling over her shoulders as if it were woven for her, flowing down her back in trailing folds that stitch together the cracks we’ve formed in the ground.
We remain on our knees, staring up at her.
“I do not blame you,” she begins. “You made the right choice.”
Sai shakes his head. “That doesn’t—”
“No.” Her word slices through his protest with a wisp of shadow.
“You don’t get to argue with me about this.
Not for what you thought. Not for what you almost did.
Not even for what you did do.” Her gaze pins each of us in turn, her crimson stare the only light.
“You made choices based on what you knew, and you made the right ones.”
I hear her words, see her, but I can’t accept them. Not one of us can. And she feels it.
Her expression softens into defeat. “Do my words mean nothing to you?” The hurt in her tone is unbearable.
“They mean everything,” Julien rasps, gaze intent on her. Always on her. “But we do not deserve them.”
“I’ll decide what you deserve,” she snarls as shadows burst around her frame, the red of her eyes a glowing fire.
Then she stills, takes in our faces and slowly inhales.
“Whatever came before, every choice... it led us here, to this moment. And I would never change that.” Her gaze burns into mine, into all of us, daring us to challenge her. “You don’t have to believe in yourselves. But believe in this: my words. Me.”
We truly do not deserve her.
But she is right. Everything has led us to this moment. Here, right now. She is here, and she’s ours.
We are bonded.
And we will never, ever, lose her again.
“All this time…” Kane’s voice is the smallest I’ve ever heard it, and when he finally lifts his gaze to Jasmine’s, something in him cracks. I see it in his face, hear it in his voice. “We’ve been bonded all this time.”
Jasmine searches his expression warily, uncertain how to handle this version of my brother, then nods.
A soft sound shudders out of him before his eyes find mine. And I know that look. I’ve lived that look.
As children, when the Dark Realm crumbled around us, he stood so still on the very edge, waiting for it to consume him. That was when he turned and gave me that look.
He reached into my mind, told me to leave him behind. Let him rot away in the realm like our father. Because that’s what he believed he deserved, because he believes he’s a monster like him.
A mistake. A creature born from hatred, greed and destruction.
Instead, I reached for him, dragged him into the light with me, and never let him go.
When Kane stands, so do we.
Julien, Sai and I all close in on him before he can run. He needs to know he has us, that if he tries to leave, we will follow. To the end of this earth, to any realm, for all time.
Always.
“Kane.” His breath hitches like I’ve hit him when I barely whispered his name.
His pupils wide as they snap onto me. “You saved me.”
“Yes, brother.”
“Why?” His voice is bitter, sharp with burning hatred. “Why would you do that? It should’ve been her. I shouldn’t even be here. You should have left me to die with my father.”
Jasmine’s soft gasp distracts us all. She didn’t know that part of our tale, not through omission, but because neither of us could bear to relive it. Until now.
I step closer. “Kane.”
He rips himself away from me, turning to face us all.
“Jasmine could have died because of me. If I never existed, if I wasn’t there when you found her…
I should have died three hundred years ago, that should have been my end!
” he yells, and Kane never yells. “You would never have erased her memories, never inflicted the rune, never risked her life. The four of you would have bonded without me. I am an unnecessary piece in this bond. I am a mistake. I bring destruction wherever I go—”
I grip his arm, drag him to me. “You’re my brother, Kane. I would never have left you. I’ll never leave you.”
“Brother?” A sound tears from his throat, like a snarl and a laugh, so sour and vile it makes me step back. “We are nothing alike, Ezekial. Nothing.”
“You’re right,” I admit instantly, and he flinches.
“You lived a life of depravity and horror, where the people who should have shown you love and protection failed you, and yet you saved me. You took me out of The Divide, out of the Dark Realm, you gave me a purpose, kept me in control. I would never have survived this world without you. If you had died that day, I would have followed you.” His eyes widen.
“I’ll follow you anywhere, Kane.” I step closer.
“You’re more than my brother, you’re my hero.
So no, we’re not alike. Because I’ll never be able to save you the way you saved me. But I’ll always try.”
Kane is silent, but he never looks away.
I reach for him again, fingers curling around his shoulder. “I only ever survived because of you.”
Jasmine’s right, he was the right choice, the only choice at that moment, and he has to know it.
“I will never—never—regret choosing you, Kane. Because I wouldn’t be here without you.”
A soft breath breaks through his lips, like some part of this is getting through to him. But then I see it in him, feel it through our shared blood, our bond.
He still doesn’t believe me.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he whispers. “I don’t deserve this.” His eyes shift to Jasmine’s. “I don’t deserve—”
She moves before I can, stepping into the space Kane is trying to create.
“We decide that you do.” Her voice is quiet, but it pierces the realm. “You can claim to be unworthy, say you’re a monster through and through, but that’s not what I see, Kane. It’s not what any of us see.”
She steps even closer, but slowly, like she’s approaching something wounded, and then places her palm to his chest.
“You’re mine,” she declares, solid and so sure. “You’re ours.”
Kane’s expression crumples as her claim sinks into him, as it presses against every fractured part of him, filling in the cracks, forcing all the broken pieces to heal, to feel.
And, finally, he lets them.
His hand lifts, gripping hers against him, shadows curling around their joined skin. “What if we never found you again?”
“But you did.” Jasmine smiles, it’s small but so devastatingly beautiful.
“And if you hadn’t…” Her eyes soften, the blazing inferno dimming to a glowing ember as she looks at us all. “In any district, in any realm, in any universe… I would have found you. Every. Single. One. Of you.”
We all stare at our bond, and in the quiet of the realm, a calm descends upon us I’ve never experienced, because now—for once—Kane is no longer fighting.
Even if a piece of him still wants to run, still struggles to believe in her, or me, or us… he stays.
He submits to the bond.
“We will spend every second of our existence trying to prove ourselves worthy,” he declares for us all. “For as long as it takes. Forever.”
It isn’t a demand, nor a claim, but a promise.
A vow.
“Even if we don’t deserve you.” His fingers tighten around hers. “You’re ours.”
Jasmine’s expression softens as she stares at my brother, like she never truly believed he’d say it. Not him.
Then she smiles.
Even dimmed beneath the rune, the bond sings louder now. A steady pull beneath the quiet, a heavenly hum thrumming through us all.
And when I glance at my unit, at my brothers, I see we all wear the same expression. The grief of what we did, but more so, the desperation to fix it. And we will.
We’ll become worthy of her, however long it takes.