Her eyes stay closed. Her chest stays still.
“Noa, open your fucking eyes,” I command, forcing every shred of authority I have into it, as if an alpha bark alone might be strong enough to bring her back to me.
It fails. Of course it does.
I put my hands on her chest and start compressions, counting under my breath even as my throat grows nearly too tight to truly speak. I tilt her chin back, seal my mouth over hers, and push air into her lungs. I breathe for her because she isn’t breathing for herself. Because if she won’t do it on her own, then I will. As long as it takes.
“Wake up, baby,” I beg between breaths. “Come on. Let me see those eyes.”
I don’t stop.
“I’m right here,” I choke, my forehead resting briefly against hers. “You hear me? I’m right fucking here.”
Too still.
I breathe for her again.“Don’t do this, Noa. Wake up.”
Silence.
“Just breathe,” I whisper against her mouth next. “That’s all I need you to do, sweet one. Just take a breath for me.”
The pleas keep coming, spilling out of me unchecked as I work over her. The next one shreds something vital inside me.
“No, baby, please…stay with me. You have to keep breathing. Please don’t leave me, Noa!”
This string of words tastes of bile because I’ve said it before.
The truth crashes into me with nauseating clarity as I keep pressing, keep forcing air into her, refusing to stop. The phantom sensation of the terrifying threads Noa can wield slither across my sweating skin. With them comes the memory of what they’d forced me to see—to live through. My greatest fear made corporal. This moment. Me trying and failing to save her. Her dying in my arms.
Only this time, it isn’t an illusion.
It’s real.
And I fear I really am failing.
Tears I have no control over spill from my eyes and splash down onto her lifeless, colorless face as I fight for her life.
“Don’t do this, sweet girl. Don’t you fucking dare do this.”
I can’t be sure how long I keep going. Time has stopped meaning anything. When I finally pull back, panting, my hands tremble as I reach for her neck, fingers searching for a pulse that isn’t there.
Still nothing.
A thought claws its way up through the wreckage—a last, desperate gamble.
I don’t allow myself time to question it.
Brushing the tangle of dark hair aside, I bow over her, and press my lips to the place on her throat I’ve already claimed as mine. The place where her pulse should be.
“You don’t get to leave me,” I whisper against her skin. “Not after I spent years believing I was whole, only to learn I’d been missing my heart the entire time.” I kiss her once more, lingering there and breathing her in, before giving her the words she deserved to hear long before it came to this. “I love you, sweet Noa.”
And then I bite her.
My canines burn as they lengthen into my wolf’s. I sink them in deep enough to scar. Deep enough to bind. Deep enough to leave my mark on her soul. Deep enough to hopefully keep her here.
Her blood coats my tongue and my body rebels. Not because of the taste, but because of the truth it carries. This isn’t a claiming to be savored. It’s a reckoning. Either my life continues from this moment forward, or it ends here. With her.
I don’t have any time to process this fully before the air in the closet starts to hum, charged and alive, the hair on my neck lifting. It’s the only warning I get before the magic explodes. It tears through my chest in a violent, blinding rush, igniting fromthe place that single defiant thread has clung to life all these weeks.
