There was no response. There never was, with these restraints.
But that night, as exhaustion finally pulled me toward sleep, something changed.
28
Elle
The dream didn’t start like a dream. It started like being yanked from the bottom of the ocean by an invisible hand—sudden, disorienting, gasping into awareness.
I found myself in another fantastical garden, but different from before.
Roses grew downward from clouds that drifted at waist height, their petals glowing with sunset hues. Trees sprouted from pools of bright, flowing water, their branches reaching down instead of up, heavy with fruit with surfaces like oil slicks—rainbow patterns constantly moving. The grass beneath my bare feet felt like silk and hummed with a melody I almost recognized—something my grandmother used to hum while tending her tomatoes.
I walked deeper into this impossible place, drawn by the sound of water. A stream flowed in spirals through the air, fish made of golden light swimming against gravity. Where droplets looked like candy, flowers bloomed in midair, their roots dangling like jewelry.
There was a swing hanging from nothing—just two ropes extending up into empty sky that somehow held my weight when I sat. My cheeks heated when I thought about the Pleasure Garden, and the last time I was in a swing. As I swayed back and forth, butterflies with wings of stained glass gathered around me, each one carrying a different memory reflected in its wings. My first day of school. My mother’s laugh. The taste of birthday cake. Kaelren’seyes when he’d first really seen me.
I reached out to touch one—the memory of my grandmother’s hands teaching mine to braid—when I heard footsteps approaching from behind.
“Elle?”
I turned, nearly falling off the swing, and there he was. Kaelren, but not quite as I’d last seen him. His corruption was present but controlled here, creating patterns across his skin that looked like calligraphy written in ash. His eyes—those impossible silver eyes—were looking at me like I was something he’d lost and found again.
“How—” I started, but he was already moving.
He hit me like a wave, crushing me against him with desperate force that drove the air from my lungs. His hands were everywhere—my face, my hair, my back—like he was trying to confirm I was real through touch alone.
“Elle. Elle.Elle.” He kept saying my name like a prayer, his face buried in my neck, his whole body shaking. “I felt you dying. Through the bond, I felt youscreaming, and I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t—”
“I’m here,” I gasped, clinging to him just as desperately. “I’m here, I’m okay—”
“You’re not okay.” He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the anguish in his face made my chest ache. His hands came up to frame my face, tilted it toward what passed for light in this place. “I can see the marks. The welts. Your lip—” His thumb ghosted over my split lip, and his eyes went black. “What did he do to you?”
“Kaelren—”
“What. Did. He. Do.”
“Tests,” I said, and my voice broke despite my best efforts. “He’s trying to tune me. Make my marks align with the Bloom properly. It’s—” I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t find words for what Auradelle had done to me.
The space around us responded to his fury—the stars beneath our feet went dark, the roots above writhed and screamed, and something that might have been thunder, if thunder could exist here, rolled through everything. The temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath.
“I’m going to tear him apart,” Kaelren said, and his voice was barelyhuman. “Cell by cell. I’m going to make him experience every moment of pain he’s inflicted on you magnified a thousand times, and when he begs for death I’m going to keep him alive just to continue—”
I kissed him.
Hard and desperate and probably stupid given my split lip, but I needed to ground him, ground us both. He made a sound low in his throat—half growl, half sob—and kissed me back like I was oxygen and he’d been drowning. His hands slid into my hair, angling my head, and I tasted copper and salt and desperation.
When we finally broke apart, we were both shaking.
“Where is this?” I asked, my forehead pressed against his. “How are you here?”
“I don’t know.” His hands were still in my hair, his thumbs tracing small circles against my skull like he couldn’t bear to stop touching me. “I’ve been pushing against the bond for days, trying to find you through the suppression. And then suddenly, I felt you. Like a light in the dark. Your mind created this, I think.”
“So this is a dream?”
“No.” His eyes searched mine, silver and desperate and more alive than anything else in this impossible place. “Or maybe. I don’t know. But it feels real. You feel real. The bond between us—it’s clearer here than it’s ever been, like all the interference has been stripped away.” He pulled me closer, if that was even possible. “I can feel everything you’re feeling right now. The fear. The pain. The exhaustion.”
“Then you know I don’t have much time.” I forced myself to say it. “He’s breaking me down, Kaelren. Systematically. Tomorrow he’s going to try something worse—”
