Horror floods through me, my shadows responding before I can stop them, darkening violently as they whip around the room. The temperature drops. Frost forms on the window. I step back from her, desperate to put distance between us as memory overwhelms me, as the shadow poison inside me reacts to my fear.
"Malakai?" she questions, confusion and the beginnings of fear in her voice.
I try to respond, to explain that it's not her I fear, not our potential child, but myself—my capacity for destruction when faced with such vulnerability. The curse that killed my first mate. But no words come, only a strangled sound of denial.
My shadows lash out involuntarily, scraping against the wall beside her head—too close. She flinches, her eyes widening.
I sense her sudden panic, her protective maternal instinct flaring even though?—
Wait.
Maternal instinct. The way her hand covers her stomach. The sweetness in her scent. The changes I attributed to our bond settling.
She's not asking hypothetically.
She might be pregnant. My Omega might be carrying my child.
The possibility crashes through me so completely that my shadows explode outward in a wave of darkness. The mirror cracks. Candles extinguish. The very air seems to freeze as the shadow poison inside me responds to my panic.
Seraphina backs away, her hand still covering her stomach in a gesture that now seems unmistakable—protective, maternal, defensive.
"I... I just remembered," she whispers, her voice strained as she edges toward the door. "I need to speak with Ivy again. About tomorrow's... attire."
"Seraphina, wait—" I reach for her, finally finding my voice, desperate to explain.
But she's already slipping through the door, her movements fluid and quick as the assassin she was trained to be. Fear, disappointment, determination flash across her expression. But she's gone before I can explain, before I can tell her that my reaction has nothing to do with her or a potential child and everything to do with the cursed monster I fear still lurks inside me.
She thinks I would harm a child. She thinks I'm capable of hurting her.
And why wouldn't she? I've never shared the truth about Julia, about what really happened. I've never explained why the idea of fatherhood fills me with such terror—not for the child, but for what my shadow poison might do in an instant of lost control.
I've never revealed that I love her too much to risk destroying her as I destroyed Julia.
The shadow poison pulses inside me, responding to my emotional chaos. My shadows writhe uncontrollably, darker and more violent than they've been in decades. The curse is getting worse. And if Seraphina is pregnant...
If a child from a fated bond is growing inside her...
Julia was cursed, and trying to save her destroyed us both. What if loving Seraphina draws the same enemies?
I turn to the ebony mirror, my reflection a stranger staring back at me—a cursed Alpha caught between the monster he's cultivated and the vulnerability he's tried to deny.
A future that now hangs by the thinnest of threads, all because I couldn't face my past.
All because the shadow poison I carry might destroy my mate and our unborn child—if there is one.
I need to find her. Need to explain. Need to tell her everything, even the parts that might make her hate me again. Because if she is carrying our child—a twilight child, a child of both shadow and light—then she needs to know the danger.
And she deserves to know that I have fallen hopelessly, irrevocably in love with her.
Even if that love might be the death of her.
CHAPTER 33
THE WALLS CLOSE IN
Seraphina
The morning after I read Julia's journal, I find myself unable to stay in our chambers. The walls feel like they're closing in, the air too thick to breathe. Every time I close my eyes, I see her final words — Forgive me, beloved — written in a hand that knew death was coming.
