Rafe moves first—thunder in his body. He charges, fists smashing into silhouettes, taking two down with one swing. Smoke wraps around us. I raise both hands. Glow bursts outward. Light meets shadow in the courtyard. My power stretches. Gold washes over Rafe, over me, over the ground between. It gives him clarity. He fights with renewed ferocity—blow after blow, shielded by my light.
One soldier lunges for me. I step forward, channeling energy through my palms. It swells. The soldier hisses as light slams him, crackling against his mask, scorching the leather, sending him flying back. Others reel. The masked figure curses. He drops the torch and retreats toward the gate. His men falter.
Rafe catches me before I sway. “You held them off,” he breathes. “You saved us all.”
I lean into him, trying to slow my heartbeat. The air pulses with aftershocks. The fire around us shudders. The masked figure flees through the gate, the others collapse or flee in the smoke.
Rafe drags me inside. We slam the doors, barricade debris. Inside, the villa smells of burned timbers and mercy. Wounded lie sprawled across floors. I kneel, pressing healing into them, light stitching flesh, easing pain, mending fractures one by one. Rafe helps, carrying bodies, shielding from debris. He watches me as I give everything I have. Every glowing wave is exhaustion but salvation.
Later, after the last body surrenders to sleep or relief, I collapse into Rafe’s arms. Smoke drifts through brokenwindows. The villa trembles. He cradles me, whispering wordless things into my hair. His heartbeat thunders in my ear.
“You were brilliant,” he murmurs. His hands still glow faint from my light touching him. “Brighter than I ever knew possible.” He kisses the top of my head, then my lips.
The rain begins—soft, tentative, washing ash and burning scent from stones. Outside, the night sighs, wounded but alive.
I exhale. My body trembles. I press my hand to my chest. The glow recedes, leaving me spent but whole. In his arms, I feel something shift. Confidence. Connection. A dangerous hope blooming in the darkness.
He pulls me closer. I meet his lips, fierce and needy, and the villa echoes with our breathing and promise. He whispers, “I will scorch the world to keep you safe.”
I press my forehead to his. “Then let’s burn it together.”
And in that moment, fire outside or walls collapsing, I know that so long as I glow, so long as he stands beside me, we may survive this night—and whatever comes next.
26
RAFE
My head feels like it’s both crushing and hollow, like I’m inside a chest that’s trying to expand but can’t find air. A haze presses behind my eyes, bone-deep exhaustion laced with rage so thick it tastes like poison. The mark burns along my ribcage—a sear of curse left raw and ragged. I stagger through the villa’s corridors, blood falling from my fists, footprints smeared on stone, and I swear every wall shifts under me.
Kaleigh is always somewhere ahead of me in this darkness. I hear her breath, steady and calm, as though she carries the quiet center while I tremble at the edges of chaos. By the time I reach the central hall, the broken windows flood the room with ash-dusted moonlight, the scent of smoke lingering like a memory. She’s kneeling over one of the wounded, hands glowing faint gold as she presses healing into burned flesh. Her face is turned because she heard me arrive—and the moment she sees me, something in her stills.
I try to speak. I want to ground myself through her voice. But all that comes out is a rasp, low and broken. “Kaleigh.”
Her eyes widen, then soften, and she rises slowly, luminous in that glow. She shifts from the wounded to stand between meand whatever darkness I’m chasing. The glow pulses under her skin, richer now, attuned to something that thrums beneath our bones.
I lurch toward her anyway. The rage is a beast ripping free in me. The curse stabs me from within. The Seal’s pressure roars against my mind like a tidal wave. I want to fight it. I want to tear through the walls, rip Roman apart. But my steps falter.
She reaches up, fingers brushing across the scar down my neck. Her touch is light—soothing rather than fierce—and I swear something inside me quivers under that contact. Her glow surges, a tide of golden light that spreads outward, filling the hall, chasing shadows back into corners.
“You can’t let it win,” she whispers. Her voice echoes soft, but stronger than any roar inside me. “Don’t let it tear you apart.”
A wave of nausea twists through me and I buckle. The curse claws at me from the inside. The heat burns across my skin, and I retch, doubled over. The flare of agony rings in my skull, every nerve screaming.
She drops to her knees beside me, props one hand on my burning chest. The glow from her palm floods upward, warming the cold ache between ribs, softening the jagged edges of pain. She murmurs words I can’t fully catch, not names or incantations, but resonance. The light flows through me, pulsing like a breath, weaving into me like threads of dawn.
I gasp. The poison in my blood recoils, forced back by her warmth. The rage that’s poisoned my mind sees her and falters. The Seal’s voice claws at me again, louder. I hear it echoing behind eyelids, a distant roar—Bond and serve. Bond and serve.It tries to drag me back into that old promise, that old leash. I grit my teeth against it, but the light in her hand brightens. She sinks deeper, body trembling, channeling through her core.
I see it then: a bond forming. She presses her palm fully flat to my chest, glow flooding through both of us, threads weavingbetween our hearts. I feel her warmth, her will, intertwined now with mine. My breathing steadies. The poison recedes. The Seal’s roar dips and becomes quieter, more internal.
I corner of my mind trembles with suspicion and fear. If I let it, this bond could burn me, break me. But I trust her with that risk. I trust her with everything.
My voice comes soft, ragged: “Don’t stop.”
She doesn’t. Her eyes close. The light flows through the scars, the bones, the ridges of my muscle, seeping into places I didn’t know needed mending. The curse hisses, fights back, but the radiant thread she offers is stronger now. I wrap my arms around her, anchoring us together as she pours more of herself into me.
Then it happens.
The Seal’s voice speaks one last time—distinct, cold, austere. It rattles in my bones, not as command but as a final warning:
