Once Henrich was gone, the laboratorium was erased. The Drachenfels gates were sealed. The last surviving test subjects were turned to ash. One final storm. One finalmercy.
That lightning strike chipped the last of Kael’s humanity away until there was barely a breath left.
The cure spread across the kingdom, a compound of blood and toxin bound together in blue light, a shimmering serum that glowed when turned in the hand. Crates were shipped to every corner of Terra, and by winter’s end, the Breath of Death was gone.
Shawls fell to the ground like snow.
People burned them in the streets, dancing around the fires.
And no one looked back.
Kael returned to the castle walls once more, to stay. The king, grateful for the magi’s work, changed the subject whenever Drachenfels was mentioned. He never asked what had happened there. He never asked Kael anything about it. And so life resumed. The plague was vanquished. The people of Terra were free.
But freedom left a hollow echo.
At the academy, Kael learned that Evangelina’s heart had shattered after her betrothed’s departure. She had locked herself away in her quarters, mourning quietly. He imagined her curled in the dim light, shoulders trembling. He wanted to go to her. To hold her until the trembling stopped. To press her against him until her ribs cracked beneath his hands, until she wept every tear her doe eyes could give, and then to be the one to dry them.
But he didn’t.
Because she was a fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.
Two years passed. The leaves turned and fell. And then Chancellor Bramwell Alderholt announced he had appointed a new magister for the Council of Farming.
Evangelina Corvo.
The words struck like thunder in his skull. His world, carefully walled and warded, threatened to fracture. She was not meant to step out of his mind and into these halls. She belonged to the dream, not the waking. She was the one thing in existence he could never touch, yet now she would walk the same corridors, breathe the same air.
He couldn’t let it happen. But he did. Because he wanted to.
And for the first time in years, Kael dared to think, what if she could be more than a fantasy?
Everyone who had ever loved him had left. None could bear the storm. For him, love had always meant ruin, either being destroyed by it or abandoning him to it.
But what if Evangelina was different?
He crushed the thought as soon as it formed. Those what-ifs were poison. They stirred the part of him that should never wake. The part that still believed in redemption. The part that still believed in hope.
How could a man like him even imagine deserving a woman like her? He wasn’t a man. He was a monster. Some would call him an abomination. He was the thing men became when mercy burned away and only ruin remained.
So he made his choice, as he always did.
He would watch from a distance.
Her nearness would change nothing. He would fight it—the pull, the hunger, the need.
She would remain the fantasy.
His escape in the black hours.
The dream of the woman he could love without destroying, and the only one who would never let him go.
Chapter 24
Evie
Kael’s words struck something primal in me, fear at first, cold and deep, curling up my throat until I realized it wasn’t fear at all but bile. I was about to wretch.
He told me of Bashir al’Qamar. Of the experiments that had happened here at Drachenfels Keep. Of the magisters who’d each had their part to play. Of everything he had done.
