Chapter 2
The bond didn't pull anymore—it demanded.
Each step I took eastward wound the thread tighter around whatever served as my heart, until I couldn't tell where the ache ended and I began.
The volcanic slopes gave way to scrubland, then to forests of black-barked trees I didn't recognize, their branches reaching toward stars that wheeled overhead in patterns I was still learning to read.
The world had changed while I was dead. The path hadn't.
Something in my blood knew exactly where to go.
My bare feet found purchase on stones and roots and soft earth, guided by instinct older than thought.
The keep's warmth had long since faded from my skin, replaced by the cool bite of night air—but I wasn't cold.
I couldn't be cold. My body burned from the inside out, a fever that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with the presence drawing closer with every mile I covered.
The symptoms had started gradually. A flush across my cheeks. A heaviness in my breasts. The brush of my thin dress against my thighs feeling like fingers tracing patterns on sensitized skin.
Now there was nothing gradual about it.
Heat pooled low in my belly, molten and insistent, spreading through my core with every heartbeat.
My nipples had tightened to aching points against the fabric of my borrowed dress.
When I moved, the cloth shifted against them, and I had to bite back sounds that would have echoed through the silent forest. My skin had become a traitor—every sensation magnified, every touch of wind or leaf or my own tangled hair sending shivers cascading down my spine.
I was wet. Gods help me, I was soaked, my thighs slick with arousal I couldn't control and didn't understand.
The bond wasn't supposed to do this. Or maybe it was—maybe this was exactly what an incomplete bond did when it finally scented completion on the horizon.
Ten thousand years of denial, and now my body was making up for lost time whether I wanted it to or not.
I wanted it.
That was the worst part. Somewhere beneath the grief and guilt and desperate determination, I wanted this. Wanted him. Wanted the completion my cowardice had denied us both.
Then the wound-walking started, and wanting became the least of my concerns.
It hit me like a wave—no, like a wall of water crashing down from impossible heights. One moment I was walking, panting, trying to ignore the slick slide of my thighs. The next I was staggering, my hands flying out to catch a tree trunk as ten thousand years of emotion slammed into my chest.
His grief.
I had known he suffered. I had spent millennia in the void feeling the echo of the bond, knowing what my rejection had cost him. But knowing was nothing compared to feeling.
Loneliness so profound it had its own gravity, pulling everything else into its orbit.
Centuries of waking in darkness, reaching for a presence that should have been beside him and finding nothing.
The slow erosion of hope—first a trickle, then a flood, until hope became a memory and memory became ash.
He had counted every day. Every hour. Every moment of the ten thousand years I had left him alone in the dark.
I gasped, my nails digging into bark, tears streaming down my face that weren't entirely mine.
Rage came next. Cold and vast and patient in a way that made my newly-made bones ache.
He had loved me with everything he was, and I had repaid that love by running.
By dying. By leaving him to rot in a prison of other people's making while I floated in comfortable nothing.
The rage didn't burn—it froze, crystallizing around his heart until even the memory of warmth became painful.
And beneath the rage, beneath the grief that threatened to drown me—
Despair.
The worst of it. The knowledge that he had been made wrong, somehow. That his love was too vast, too consuming, too much for anyone to bear. That even his fated mate, his perfect match, the other half of his soul, had looked at what he offered and chosen death over acceptance.
I sobbed against the tree, my whole body shaking, absorbing pain that had accumulated for millennia without anyone to share it.
This was my gift. This was what I did—took suffering into myself and transmuted it through my own flesh.
But I had never taken anything like this.
Had never felt grief so old it had become geography, rage so deep it had become foundation.
Then the desire hit.
My back arched off the tree. A moan tore from my throat, loud enough to startle birds from branches overhead. Because threaded through all that grief, all that rage, all that despair—he wanted me.
Still.
After everything.
His desire was a living thing, vast and hungry and so long denied it had become something feral.
He wanted to touch me, to taste me, to bury himself so deep inside me that we'd never be separate again.
He wanted to hear me say his name. Wanted to watch me come apart beneath him.
Wanted to care for me, provide for me, wrap me in his protection and never let anything hurt me again.
He wanted to destroy me for leaving.
He wanted to worship me for returning.
I'm coming, I thought at him, pushing the words through the golden thread with everything I had. I didn't know if he could hear me. Didn't know if communication worked that way, or if I was just screaming into a void. But I needed him to know. I'm coming, and I'm not leaving again.
The thread pulsed.
For one moment—just one—the grief eased. The rage softened. Something that might have been hope flickered through the bond like a candle flame in a hurricane.
Then it was gone, buried beneath ten thousand years of learned cynicism.
But I had felt it.
Somewhere in the monster I had made, the man I had loved was still waiting.
I pushed off from the tree, wiped my face with shaking hands, and kept walking east.
It was a long journey. Days of wandering, hoping that I wouldn’t be spotted. I didn’t see in dragons in flight. I wondered if they were looking for me. They had to be.
Eventually, the Sunken Palace revealed itself. It was a wound in the world—a rift in the earth that shouldn't exist, sealed edges still raw after thousands of years.
I stood at the edge of the chasm and looked down into darkness that glowed.
The Dragon Lords had sealed Valdris here, I knew.
Had poured their combined power into chains and wards and barriers meant to contain what I had broken.
But even imprisoned, even diminished, he had made something breathtaking from his cage.
The descent was carved into the chasm's walls—stairs of compressed moonlight that spiraled down into depths the stars couldn't reach. I took the first step, and the light recognized me. It warmed beneath my bare feet, guiding me down, welcoming me home.
The architecture defied everything I knew about the world.
Walls of frozen starlight rose around me as I descended, their surfaces catching wavelengths that shouldn't exist and scattering them into impossible patterns.
Corridors twisted through dimensions I couldn't name—I'd turn a corner and find myself walking on what should have been a ceiling, gravity reorienting without warning, my stomach lurching before settling into the new normal.
Ceilings showed skies from worlds that no longer existed: violet suns setting over seas of silver, twin moons rising above forests of crystal, auroras that spelled words in languages that had died before humans learned to speak.
It was beautiful in a way that hurt.
Too perfect. Too ordered. Too still. Like a museum dedicated to a man who had forgotten how to be messy, how to be warm, how to be anything but the cold perfection of grief made manifest.
Like him, I thought. Like what he became when I broke him.
The first cultist appeared without warning—stepping from a shadow that hadn't contained him a moment before. He wore robes of deep black trimmed in silver, and a mask of polished obsidian hid his features. I tensed, ready to fight, ready to run—
He bowed.
Deep and reverent, his forehead nearly touching the floor of compressed moonlight. "First Bride," he murmured. "We have awaited your return."
He stayed bowed as I passed, frozen in supplication, and I walked on with my heart pounding in my chest.
More appeared as I descended. Dozens of them, then what felt like hundreds—lining the corridors, emerging from doorways, their obsidian masks all turning toward me with an attention that made my skin crawl.
They bowed. They parted. They whispered words I couldn't quite catch, prayers and benedictions in voices that trembled with fervor.
They worshipped him.
The monster I had made—they had built a religion around his suffering.
I kept walking. Couldn't stop, even if I'd wanted to.
The bond was a physical force now, pulling me forward through halls where my footsteps echoed against floors of compressed moonlight, past chambers filled with stolen artifacts and harvested magic, past the Archive that Lena had described—thousands of obsidian jars containing bonding potential ripped from women who had died screaming.
I absorbed their echoes without meaning to. Fragments of terror and confusion and the desperate final prayers of girls who hadn't understood why they were chosen. My gift couldn't help but reach for pain, couldn't help but try to ease suffering even when the sufferers were long dead.
My eyes burned with tears that weren't mine. My core still ached with need that was.
The contrast was maddening—grief and arousal tangled together until I couldn't separate them, until the tears on my cheeks felt like part of the slickness between my thighs, until every sensation became part of the same overwhelming whole.
And then the air grew warmer.