Chapter 6
Day six. I was running out of time.
And when I woke, I felt wrong.
Not wrong like pain or illness—wrong like I had shed some essential layer of myself during the night and couldn't remember where I'd put it.
The light through the crystal windows was too bright.
It hurt in ways light shouldn't hurt, pressing against my eyes like a physical weight, making me flinch and burrow deeper into the silk sheets.
The sound of my own breathing seemed loud.
The distant pulse of the palace's silver veins—usually a comfort—felt overwhelming, too much input for a mind that had suddenly forgotten how to process.
Everything was too big.
The bed stretched around me like an ocean, vast and impossible, and I was a small thing lost in its center. The blankets had become a fortress. I pulled them over my head and curled into the smallest shape my body could manage, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight around myself.
The velvet dragon.
The thought surfaced with desperate urgency.
I needed it. Needed the soft weight of it against my chest, the button eyes that promised nothing and therefore couldn't disappoint.
My hand reached out from the blanket-cocoon, fumbling across the mattress until my fingers found that sunset-colored velvet, worn soft from ten thousand years of waiting.
I pulled it to my chest and breathed.
Better. A little better.
But not enough.
I didn't want to think about the equinox.
Didn't want to calculate the hours remaining—two days, forty-eight hours, some number of minutes that kept getting smaller no matter how desperately I wished time would stop.
I didn't want to remember Valdris's voice saying I'm going to kill you or the terrible war I could feel through the bond, monster and man tearing at each other with increasing desperation.
I didn't want to be the woman who had to save him.
I just wanted to be small. Just wanted someone else to carry the weight for a while. Just wanted—
Daddy.
The word pulsed through me like a second heartbeat. Not a plan. Not a strategy. Just pure, desperate need, rising up from somewhere deeper than thought.
I wanted Daddy.
The door opened without warning, and I went still beneath the blankets.
His presence flooded the room the way it always did—that gravitational pull, that dark star awareness that made every cell in my body reach toward him.
I heard the soft clink of a tray being set down.
Heard his footsteps cross the moonstone floor.
Then silence.
He was looking at me. I could feel his gaze even through the blanket-fortress, even with my eyes squeezed shut and the velvet dragon pressed to my chest like a shield.
"Evara."
His voice was careful. Testing.
I didn't answer. Couldn't answer. The word was too big for my mouth, required too much effort from a mind that had gone soft and small.
The bed dipped as he sat beside me. His hand found the edge of the blanket and lifted it—gently, so gently—revealing my face to the crystal-light.
I blinked up at him.
Something in his expression shifted. Softened.
He understood. Of course he did.
"Little one." His voice dropped to something warm and velvet-soft. "You're feeling small today."
I nodded. A tiny movement, barely perceptible, but he caught it. Of course he caught it. He caught everything.
"That's all right." He brushed a strand of hair from my face, his touch impossibly gentle. "That's perfectly all right."
He rose from the bed, and I made a sound—a small, involuntary whimper of protest at the loss of his presence. But he was already setting aside the breakfast tray, already turning back to me with an expression that made my throat tight.
Then he was lifting me.
His arms scooped beneath my blanket-wrapped body like I weighed nothing at all, like I was something precious that needed cradling rather than a woman grown.
The velvet dragon stayed clutched to my chest as he gathered me against him, silk sheets trailing, my face pressed into the warm curve of his throat.
I breathed him in.
Ancient magic and winter stars and something warm underneath—that heat I'd discovered in the bathing chamber, the fire that still burned beneath the frost. The heat of creation. He smelled like home. Like safety. Like everything I had ever wanted and been too afraid to reach for.
My arms wrapped around his neck. My fingers fisted in the fabric of his shirt. I pressed myself as close as I could get, trying to disappear into him, to let his body become a shield against everything that was too much, too loud, too bright.
"I have you," he murmured against my hair. His lips pressed to my temple—not a kiss, not exactly, just contact. Just presence. Just the steady reassurance of his breath warm against my skin. "Daddy has you."
Something cracked open in my chest.
Pure, overwhelming relief at finally being held by someone strong enough to carry everything I couldn't.
"Let me take care of everything today." His voice was a low rumble I felt more than heard, vibrating through his chest and into my body. "You don't have to think. Don't have to plan. Don't have to be anything except my good little girl."
I clung tighter.
The words washed over me like warm water, dissolving the tension I'd been holding for days—for years, for millennia, for as long as I could remember. All the guilt. All the calculation. All the desperate strategizing about how to save him from himself before time ran out.
Gone.
Just for today. Just for now. I could let it all go and trust him to catch me.
I let myself fall.
His arms tightened around me in response, and I felt him press another kiss to my hair—longer this time, lingering, like he was breathing me in the same way I'd been breathing him.
Through the bond, I felt something I hadn't felt before.
Not desire, though that was there too, a constant undercurrent that never fully faded. Not grief or rage or the cold determination to break me.
Peace.
The corridors flowed past in a blur of silver-veined crystal, and I didn't care where we were going. Didn't care about anything except the steady rhythm of his footsteps and the warmth of his arms cradling me against his chest.
The nursery. I knew without asking that's where he was taking me.
My head rested against his shoulder. My fingers still clutched the sunset-colored dragon. I was floating in that soft, warm space where nothing hurt and nothing mattered except—
The pulse hit like a fist to the chest.
Dark magic. Wrong magic. Something that tasted of corruption and stolen life and violated sacred things, rippling through the palace walls like poison spreading through veins.
Valdris went rigid.
His arms tightened around me—not comforting now but protective, crushing me against him as if he could shield me from whatever had just breached his domain. Through the bond I felt his attention snap outward, felt the monster rise to the surface with predatory focus.
"Stay here."
His voice had changed. Gone was the velvet warmth, the Daddy-softness that had been cradling me only moments before. This was ice and ancient fury, the voice of a being who had destroyed civilizations before humans learned to speak.
He set me on a chaise in the corridor—carefully, even now, even with rage bleeding through the bond.
His hands adjusted the blanket around my shoulders.
His eyes met mine for one brief moment, and I saw the war there—the man who wanted to stay with me and the monster who needed to deal with the intruder.
"Do not follow me."
Then he was gone, strides eating distance, shadows gathering around him like a cloak as he moved toward the throne room.
I lasted approximately thirty seconds.
The bond pulled at me. Fear pulled at me. The desperate need to know what was threatening us—threatening him—pulled at me until I slid from the chaise on trembling legs and followed on silent feet.
The palace had taught me its secrets over these six days. Which corridors echoed and which swallowed sound. Where the crystal pillars cast shadows deep enough to hide in. How to move through Valdris's domain like a ghost, unseen and silent.
I found a pillar near the throne room entrance and pressed myself behind it, peering through a gap in the crystal lattice.
Valdris stood before his shadow-throne, magnificent and terrible in his fury. The air around him crackled with contained power, with the promise of destruction held in check by will alone.
And before him—
A figure materializing from shadow. Not stepping out of it but *becoming* from it, like the darkness itself had decided to take human form.
Lord Solmar.
I recognized him from the memories that had bled through the bloodline, from Lena's terror and Thalia's guilt.
Tall and lean with features like a blade—sharp, aristocratic, designed for cutting.
Silver hair swept back from a face that would have been handsome if not for the oily confidence oozing from every pore.
He moved with the self-assured grace of a man who had never been denied anything he wanted.
My stomach turned.
This was the architect. The man who had orchestrated the sacrifices, who had harvested bonding magic from murdered girls, who had built a religion around Valdris's suffering and called it devotion.
"You dare enter my domain?" Valdris's voice was ice over volcanic fire, cold enough to freeze and hot enough to burn.
Solmar bowed—a practiced motion, smooth and deep, the bow of a sycophant who had perfected the art of flattery. "I bring tribute, my lord. A token of the cult's continuing dedication to your ascension."
He straightened and produced vials from within his robes.
Silver liquid glowed within the glass—luminescent, beautiful, and utterly wrong. I knew what it was before my mind could form the words. Bonding potential. The magical essence ripped from women who had died screaming, their souls' deepest capacity for love perverted into fuel for destruction.