Chapter Eleven - Evie
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Evie
I LAY THERE with my face turned into the pillow. My eyes were swollen and burning, the kind of cry that leaves your body emptied out, like it scraped you clean.
The room had gone back to pristine. Of course it had. Marble, silk, silence, the careful aftertaste of nothing happened here. But my skin still remembered.
My chest still ached in a place that wasn’t muscle, deep behind my sternum, like something had been tugged loose and shoved back in wrong. I pressed my palm there, slow and careful, like touching it too directly might make it real.
Was this what it felt like? To have a bond torn. Not snapped clean, not neatly severed, but ripped, fibers screaming as they were yanked apart, leaving a raw, empty burn where the connection used to live.
The thought made my stomach roll. I didn’t want to know.
I swallowed hard and tried to breathe through the fear, the panic, but the ache didn’t fade. It sat there, heavy and wrong, like a bruise on something you weren’t supposed to be able to bruise.
A faint tremor moved through me anyway, a nervous echo that made my breath hitch— Panic.
It fluttered at the edges of my awareness like a ghost, there and gone, and for half a second I couldn’t tell if it was mine or his.
Was it Luc somewhere in the dark, teeth clenched, barely holding himself together?
Hope sparked, thin and dangerous through me. Then the memory of His hand over my heart crushed it.
“It’s you,” I told myself. “It’s just you shaking after what He did. Your body misfiring. Your mind inventing comfort where there isn’t any.”
Don’t. The word echoed sharply, urgently.
Don’t reach. Don’t check. Don’t confirm it. Because if it was gone, if He’d ripped out the bond like a weed, I didn’t know what I would do with the empty space it left behind. I didn’t know if I could survive being cut off from the one real thing I‘d had.
I stared at the wall until the blur steadied, then forced my breathing to slow. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4. In. Out. In. Out.
“Okay.” I told myself, “Just… a touch.”
Just enough to know. I needed to know. I had to know.
So I reached not with my hands. With something quiet and fragile inside me, the part that had always known how to find him. I barely dared to lean into it, like too much pressure might finish whatever damage had already been done.
Luc.
The reach was weak. A whisper. A question I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.
Nothing answered. The silence dropped out from under me, sudden and sickening, my stomach lurching as if the floor had tilted. Panic surged, hot and breathless, and my chest tightened around that hollow ache.
No. No, no, no. Please.
I reached again, still small, still so afraid, like brushing fingers along a wall in the dark, hoping to feel a door.
Luc, please.
There was only emptiness, and I thought I was now truly alone. And then—
It hit me. It wasn’t a whisper or a tremor. It was a flood.
The bond ignited with such force that it knocked the air from my lungs, a surge of presence slamming into my chest like a second heart kicking to life.
The answering warmth came in a strange layered rush, one pulse chased so closely by another it almost felt like an echo, like something inside me had begun keeping time in more than one rhythm.
I gasped, falling back onto the pillows as sensation after sensation crashed through me, overwhelming and undeniable.
Luc.
His own fear and panic poured into me first, sharp and raw, the kind that lived in the body before it reached thought.
Then there was relief, violent and shaking, like he’d been braced for the worst and found me alive instead.
Longing followed, deep and aching, threaded with rage and love and the unbearable weight of missing me.
But what I latched onto was the love. There was so much of it.
We’d never said it to each other. I’d only blurted it out in a panic when The First Light had taken me, fearing I might never get the chance again.
But now… this feeling wrapped around me, filled every hollow place He had touched, burned away the cold like sunlight breaking through frost. I felt how hard he was holding on, how close he was to breaking, how fiercely he was still choosing me.
A sob escaped me and tore loose before I could stop it. I clutched my chest as if I could hold the feeling in and keep him from slipping away again.
The bond pulsed again, steady this time, intentional, all that emotion gathered and shaped into something solid and sure.
Here. I couldn’t hear him, but the word… it landed with the weight of a vow. I’m here. I’ve got you. You’re mine. I’m not letting go.
I turned to my side, curling in on myself, shaking, letting myself drown in him for just a second, letting the love and the relief stitch me back together where I’d been coming apart.
The way his presence flooded me, fierce and unmistakable, made one thing terrifyingly clear. Whatever The First Light had tried to take… He hadn’t been strong enough to break our bond.
And then something answered deep inside me.
At first, I thought He was coming back, and my body was beginning to betray me again.
But the feeling stirred beneath the ache in my chest differently.
A slow bloom spread outward from a point I couldn’t place like something was stretching and waking slowly, like another eye opening in the dark, looking through me.
My breath hitched as my fingers tightened on the sheets.
I waited for the light to warm, but it didn’t.
And the air didn’t grow heavy. Everything was perfectly the same, but something changed inside me.
I could feel it, quiet and awake and watching, steady as a new heartbeat, and my fear dissipated.
Then I really felt it, like something in me remembered it could bite.
For just a moment, I felt it rush through me like I could take this place down to a pile of bricks with the flick of my wrist, and I lifted my hands to try. But just as I did, it pulled back, and something else followed as if my nerves had been rewired while I wasn’t paying attention.
My fingers… tingled. It wasn’t like the numbness and pins and needles you feel when your hand falls asleep. This was like a live wire under my skin.
I blinked down at my hand on the bed. The air above it shimmered gold, like when Luc and I were together. It was faint at first, like heat rising off asphalt, and then a thin thread of gold snapped between my fingertips, like lightning dancing along my skin.
I jumped, expecting pain or a shock, but none of that happened.
So I lifted my hand slowly, half afraid it would vanish the moment I looked too closely.
The gold clung between my thumb and forefinger, a delicate arc that crackled without sound.
I flexed again, and it leaped, shooting out across the room, and I yelped as the wall absorbed it.
Then, a ribbon of light strobed from my thumb across my fingers to my pinky, then snapped back. I wiggled my fingers like an idiot, and the lightning followed the movement as if I was braiding it or catching it, or maybe even guiding it.
I gasped, and with a mere thought, I did it again, slower, as I watched it skim from fingertip to fingertip, brightening when I spread my hand wide, thinning when I closed it into a fist.
This was real, and it was mine. Hope rose so fast it made me dizzy. The wall, the one between me and Mara, the one that had glowed while He hurt her, was right there, inches away, smooth and unforgiving.
I flicked my wrist and reached toward it, hand outstretched, fingers splayed like I could tear the world open with five points of gold.
“Come on,” I whispered, voice shaking. “Come on.”
The lightning flared once, sharp and bright, and I thought I felt the air change, the seam of something hidden reacting to me. Then it fizzled. The gold snuffed out like a candle, and all that was left was my shaking hand and the same perfect wall.
I stared at my fingertips, flexing them again, willing the light to come back, but there was nothing. It was just the aftertaste of it, the memory of power sparking through my bones like a promise it couldn’t keep.
But it had been there. I knew it. I wasn’t crazy. Still, I sat there for another second, staring at my own hand like it had betrayed me by going ordinary again. It still looked the same.
My throat closed. “No,” I whispered.
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and forced myself to stop.
Panic wasn’t what had brought it. Fear had cracked me open, maybe, but that wasn’t what made whatever this was answer.
But this power had answered when I stopped falling apart long enough to feel it.
So I breathed. Slowly this time. In through my nose. Out through my mouth.
Again and again, until my heart slowed. Until the room stayed still around me. Marble. Silk. Silence. No footsteps. No syrup-thick warmth in the air. No sign of Him.
I let my shoulders drop, and my jaw unclench, and I put my hands loosely in my lap.
“Okay,” I whispered to myself.
My eyes lifted to the wall I shared with Mara.
“Now would be a super convenient time to stop being mysterious.”
I stood carefully, like I was afraid any sudden movement would scare the thing inside me back into sleep. My bare feet stepped onto the marble floor without sound. I crossed to the wall and laid my palm flat against it and felt the chill of the stone seep into my skin.
At first, nothing happened. Then that strange waking presence stirred again, like something gathering somewhere deep as if something turned itself toward my voice. My breath caught as warmth slid through my chest, down my arm, and into my hand.
Gold spidered softly between my fingers. But I didn’t move. I didn’t dare as a thin gold, living current traced my knuckles, then my wrist and back again.
It didn’t hurt. It felt… attentive and curious, like it was waiting to see what I would ask of it.
I swallowed. “Show me,” I said, just louder than breath.