CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Verena
THE NIGHTMARES THAT CHASED ME that night were colder than the others, more vivid.
I was still on the mountain, still racing toward the bottom where I thought safety waited. Except, I wasn’t running. I wasn’t being chased.
I was hunting.
The ground slid beneath me like ice. No roots to trip me.
No stone to slow me. My body moved like shadow unchained, every stride a predator’s grace.
The world bled in colors not meant for even immortal eyes—blue and yellow, red and black.
My lips weren’t moving but I could hear a song, a lullaby, one made only for me.
Little bird, little bird, the forest goes still.
There's a howl in your throat and the promise to kill.
Feathers of starlight, talons of flame,
you cradle the darkness and whisper their name.
Little bird, little bird, the shadows all bend.
You breathe out beginnings and swallow the end.
And ahead, there was only her.
Her movements were quick and desperate as she stumbled, eyes flooded wide in terror when she looked back. The mountain’s base was only yards away. She could make it. But she wouldn’t.
The moment I lunged, fangs sank into the tender flesh of her legs. She screamed once before collapsing, the taste of blood and fear staining my mouth. I moved around her, over her, consuming, until her body became mine.
Until we were one.
Because the girl I had hunted wasn’t a stranger. She was me. And at last, I had become the nightmare.
The screams still clung when I shot upright, splitting the dusk. It was a different vision, but the same haunting ending. There was nothing familiar here to chase them away this time. And so, the nightmare lingered.
Moonlight lacquered the room, a silver veil draped across the sheets. They clung to my skin, tracing the tremors in me. Shadows swayed from the open windows, the breeze a cold kiss against my burning face.
I didn’t see him at first. But I felt the low tug in my chest, winding deep into my ribs. My pulse soothed as though my heart remembered him before my eyes did.
Footsteps broke the hush as he emerged from the washroom, light bending around his form. His torso glowed, loose pants hanging scandalously low at his hips. He hadn’t been here when I fell asleep. When had he returned?
Water ran from his hands, wrung between his fingers, droplets hitting the floor in small, hissed sparks.
“You’re okay,” he said, moving to where my legs hung off the side of the bed. “You’re safe. It was only a nightmare.”
The cool cloth touched first to my brow, then the dip of my temples, ending at the nape of my neck. Each press was knowing, patient, until the stutter of my breath evened.
His hands moved lower, thumbs tracing the line of my wrist, intentionally pressing into the soft center of my palm. As though he knew where every pressure point was meant to calm inside my chest.
“How did you get here so fast?” My voice rasped, rough from sleep.
He’d told me not to wait, had warned he’d be tied to meetings until dawn. I’d grumbled at his leaving, then folded under sleep like a fool.
“You were screaming.” The bristle of his jaw scratched soft against my skin as his lips brushed over my palm.
And yet, no footsteps came running but his. No one else had stirred. Apparently, my nightly horrors were nothing more than another ambient noise like crickets. Or the distant echo of murder.
“Lay back,” he demanded gently.
Tendrils unfurled from behind him, twisting like a living thing as they shifted the pillows into a throne of comfort. The bed bent to his will, angling me against the headboard. I melted into it.
“I was screaming?”
His hands caught my ankle, strong fingers digging into the sole of my foot, the other stroking slow circles across the top. A rhythm so thoughtful it unraveled me one knot at a time. This was what royalty must have felt like.
The closest I’d ever come was Gemma pinning me down as a girl to scrub the grime from my feet.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Through the bond.”
Relief shivered through me that I hadn’t woken the whole palace with bloodcurdling howls. At least no one else had been dragged into my nightmares. Only him.
But the thought of my screams being sent through the bond, of him being submitted to me so bare, was upsetting in its own right. It felt too exposed.
I pressed my palms to my eyes, hard enough to spark colors. Maybe if I willed it, he’d only heard. Not seen. Maybe the bond hadn’t betrayed me that much.
Deep-turquoise fabric slid higher up my leg as his knuckles pushed slow into my calf, and he asked, with nothing but tenderness, “Are you okay?”
If the whole king thing didn’t pan out, Ronan could make an indecent fortune in massages. Wait, pants? Since when had I been dressed in an entirely new silken skin?
I didn’t have to ask it out loud. When I looked at him, blinking slowly, waiting for the logic to appear, his mouth had already curved into that dangerous grin.
“When I came back to bed, you’d already managed to get yourself naked.”
Heat scorched my cheeks. “What?”
Those wicked eyes flicked down, unashamed. “So, I clothed you.” A pause, a playful drag. “Didn’t peek.”
I arched a brow, doubt sharp on my tongue. The corner of his mouth deepened, smoke curling lazily at my hip.
“My smoke did it.” His voice dipped lower. “Hands off this time, on my soul.”
I scoffed outright. “Please. For all I know, on your soul means nothing to you.”
A soft huff of laughter escaped him. “You might be right, I invented it.” His eyes dragged over me. “But gods, it feels right when I say it to you.”
It shouldn’t have settled in me the way it did. But fates curse me, it slid in and fit. It was strange how close it sounded to the oath Callum and I had shared all our lives. On my heart. And yet Ronan’s version snuck deeper, like it knew where to land.
I exhaled when I realized he was still waiting for me to answer. The easy response perched on my tongue. Yes, I’m fine. It was just a dream.
But the truth was too loud to lull, too real to deny. My bones throbbed with it, the Viper carried back with me out of sleep. I didn’t want him to carry it too. Not this. Not me. He already bore kingdoms on his back, chains in his blood. I refused to be another stone on that spine.
Yet I wanted him to know it was there, that it lived, existed, gnawing beneath my skin.
“No.” The word broke free from my lips. “I’m not okay.”
Because knowing what the dream meant…that was more terrifying than the nightmare itself.
Ronan had Sylen bring us a mixture of chamomile and chai. Gemma used to make it for me, but I didn’t tell him that. I only asked how he knew about the way it healed and relieved.
Dulled the burden but heightened the peace.
Turns out, he had grown up with nightmares as well. Though, unlike me, he’d escaped them.
The steam swept up between us, rich and spiced. It reminded me of him, of how he’d always felt familiar in the strangest way. Someone I had never met yet always knew.
The tea slipped down my throat, easing more than nerves as I wrapped myself into his legs, our bodies sprawled together on the chaise. His shoulders secured me, us, both my hands locked around his arms.
The moon had dipped low, sinking toward the sea, when I finally spoke. “Can you stay?”
I wasn’t going back to sleep, my body writhed too awake, morning too close. But the thought of being left alone felt...grim.
Ronan rose, taking my hand. “I have a better idea.”
He led me to the open balcony where his wings spread, tearing the night apart. Shadows shivered around us as the span of them caught the moon. He looked like everything the old stories warned of.
My instincts prickled, urging me to flinch, to fear. But I only stared. From here, he looked primeval. Beautiful in that bone-deep, ruinous way.
He slid me flush against him, one arm wrapping under my legs, the other bracing the line of my back.
Instinctively, my arm wound around his neck, clinging. “Where are we going?”
He kissed me instead of answering and I let my free hand rise to claim his jaw, pulling him deeper, erasing the last space between our mouths.
When he broke away, his breath felt like fire across my lips. “We’re going to a place that has never failed me. Not once. Not even when destiny demanded I kneel.”
Oh good. A soul-healing secret haven.
His wings stretched wider, blotting out the last threads of the moon, and then he leapt.
The drop yawned below us, black cliffs and crashing waves. Wind tore at my hair, while the weightless plunge clawed at my stomach. I might have screamed, except his chest pressed into mine, smoke veiling over me like a second set of wings drowning out the sound.
The sea rose beneath us, froth glittering, the night sky splitting with the sound of his wings as they caught the air in one violent, thunderous beat. Then another. And we were soaring.
I clung tighter and he angled his head just enough to brush his lips against my temple, a fleeting, stolen kiss.
Below us, the world blurred. Mountains, forest, sea—all gone. Only clouds and a setting sky remained. And in his arms, I almost believed I was weightless too.
The air shifted as salt thickened, biting at my lips. The roar of waves climbed until it swallowed even the sound of his flight. And when the horizon cracked open, I saw it—the jagged maw of stone made from the sea itself.
Black cliffs rose straight out of the water. In their center, a cavern gaped, vast and cathedral-high, glowing faintly blue, then green, where the waves surged and retreated. A place where sea and stone had conspired to create something secret.
A cool mist coated my skin as he angled lower, holding me steady as a cliff face rushed closer. Spray skimmed my cheeks as we crossed its threshold, diving into the cavern’s throat.
Inside there was no torrent, no wind. Just water glowing from the rocks, luminescence threading across black stone, casting the space in otherworldly light.
“This,” he said, lips brushing my ear, “is where the sea keeps its secrets.”
And tonight, it would keep ours.
The staircase twisted like an elegant dragon coiled in sleep. The further down we went, the duskier light got. From flaming to flickering, to singed-out entirely, deterring anyone from venturing down.
Ahead of me, Ronan’s wings faded into ink across his back, shifting with every step. They moved in their own fluency, not because he moved, but because they followed him. Like his smoke, they were an extension of himself.
My stomach turned as memories found their way up, ones I had locked away, sealed tight, keys cast into the abyss. The taste of stone, the weight of chains, the dungeon’s soundless dark.
You’re not there, I whispered to myself.
I wasn’t in the cell. The pain was distant. Scarred but survived. It was Ronan before me now. Not Reve. And I was safe.
I braced for rot and dust, for stale air and suffocating dark as we went down further. But each muffled step only carried more salt, more sea.
All at once the walls began to blink, thousands of glimmering eyes opening as we passed. My hand waved over the gentle glow, each softening beneath my shadow, each wavering from silver to a cool blue, bending with my breath. They felt me, my panic at the memory.
“Lunethmoths—”
Ronan stilled, turning toward where my hand skimmed across the wave of starlight. Their translucent wings winked from blue back to silver as my hand dropped.
“But I thought they were only native to Nyctom?”
Lifting his hand, his palm swept through a cluster, nearly thirty in one motion. They flared rust-red beneath him, recognizing the power he held.
“They were.” His chin tilted to the ceiling where more clung in constellations. “They were created to mirror the brilliance in its skies. But after the collapse, they migrated. Many found Ryuu’s caves to suffice, it seems.”
The moths multiplied as we moved, thousands thickening, spreading across the walls, the ceiling. Some gathered in bunches that curved into a perfect sphere, creating the illusion that Callisto’s moon hung only for us.
“Are they safe here?”
“Everyone is safe here.”
His confidence wove into me, binding to the pull of the bond.
I didn’t need to feel it to believe him.
He had given Sylen more than safety when she fled Nyctom.
He had given her life. A home. And hadn’t he done the same for me?
Even when I swore I didn’t want it, didn’t deserve it, he had still made space for me.
I turned, catching him in the glimmer of a thousand wings, his eyes burning with a certainty that everything he loved could be protected.
Ronan didn’t have a name for it, but said it’s where his flame can rest, can be still.
And it was nothing like the grand, war-ready halls above. No black stone bristling for battle. No throne forged to intimidate.
Here, the chamber walls bled into ginger, every surface pulsing with that molten hue. The air shined, alive with the glow of the lunethmoths; their wings painting the dark in threads of flame.
At the center lay a pool cut straight from the mountain, as though the gods themselves had scooped their fingers through rock. Aqua saltwater filled it, its surface lapping over the rim in delicate strokes.
Ronan stood by the wall we entered through, tendrils wreathing his hands before moving for a boulder twice his size. It shuddered along the wall before us, grinding aside with a growl. And there, behind it, was a window, opening into the sea itself. An entire, endless world pressed close.
A strike of water slammed against the barrier, shaking the chamber. But the window held. I realized then, like my room above, the sea could not breach it. That the water here would not steal me away.
The stone floor was flawless beneath my feet until I met the pool's edge. I bent closer, knees pressing against the brim, letting my hand skim its surface. The water yielded like liquid glass, smooth and impossibly soft beneath my fingertips.
“Does it heal or something?”
“Not technically.” He lowered himself beside me where the water remained calm, an oasis defiant against the chaos across the barrier. “But something about it always makes me feel more secure. Like my soul knows how to mend itself here.”
Beyond the arch of stone, beyond the horizon, daybreak had begun to unfurl, its pale light low but teasing across the waves, leaking into the cove.
“Well,” I said, sliding my shirt over my head, “let’s take a dip, shall we?”
The radiance from the pool caught against my skin, painting me in blue-green fire. The chamber thickened with a pause, his smoke restless, as if it already knew what came next.
I left it there, boldness hanging between us, daring him to answer.