Agony.
Pure, undiluted agony explodes through every nerve, every vessel, every inch of my being. I arch backward, a scream tearing from my throat as the magic of the elixir—the elixir I never chose to drink—collides with the mate bond. The claiming mark on my neck—the silvered scar where Malakai's fangs pierced my scent gland—burns as if branded with white-hot iron.
Through the bond, I feel his answering cry of anguish as the magic tears through both of us. His pain mingles with mine, doubling the torment. I sense him being thrown from his shadow steed, crashing to rocky ground as the magical backlash hits him. His body convulses, the same liquid fire racing through his veins.
His Alpha roars—I hear it through the bond, a sound of such primal fury and pain that it shakes me to my core. The sound an Alpha makes when his mate is dying.
I'm not dying by choice, I want to scream at him. I didn't choose this. I was coming back. I was coming back to you.
Through the haze of torment, I feel it—the bond stretching, thinning, straining beyond its limits. What was once a thick rope binding us together frays rapidly, threads snapping one by one.
Memories cascade through our connection as it dies—fragments of our time together dissolving like smoke. The first time he touched me with gentleness instead of possession. The way his shadows would curl protectively around me while I slept. His voice, rough with vulnerability, confessing fears he'd never told anyone. The heat-mad claiming, yes, but also the quiet moments after, when he held me like I was precious.
All of it slipping away.
I reach for the bond instinctively, desperate to hold onto these pieces of us. But they fragment in my mental hands like delicate glass, each memory shattering as I try to grasp it.
My Omega howls. The sound tears from my throat, a keen of loss so profound it echoes through the forest, sending birds screaming from the trees.
"Malakai!" His name escapes my lips, again and again. "Malakai, I'm sorry! I didn't want this! I was coming back! I love you!"
Through the rapidly dying bond, I feel his desperate attempts to reach me, to somehow hold our connection together through sheer force of Alpha will. His power surges toward me, trying to reinforce what the potion is tearing apart. But it's like trying to hold back an avalanche with bare hands.
I chose you, I try to send through the bond. I chose us. I chose our family. This wasn't my choice?—
The bond doesn't stretch.
It snaps.
The sound is deafening—though only I can hear it—like a mountain splitting in two. The claiming mark on my neck flares with blinding light, searing pain beyond anything I've ever experienced.
And then?—
Silence.
Absolute, deafening silence where his presence should be. The constant thrum of Malakai that has lived in my chest since our wedding night—gone. Not faded. Not weakened. Simply... gone.
I collapse to the forest floor, convulsing with aftershocks of magic too powerful for a mortal body to contain. But worse than the physical agony is the emotional void—the terrible, echoing emptiness where he used to be. The cold nothingness where warmth once lived.
I reach desperately for any trace of him but find only hollow silence. The mate bond isn't weakened.
It's destroyed.
My Omega curls in on itself, whimpering. Lost. Alone. Broken in ways that may never heal.
"What has she done?" I sob into the moss, my body shaking with grief as much as magical aftershock. "Oh gods, what has she done to us?"
The ground beneath me freezes, then thaws in rapid succession, responding to the chaos of my magic suddenly unbound from his shadows. Light bursts from my fingertips in uncontrolled pulses, my power seeking equilibrium now that it's no longer tethered to darkness.
My hand finds my stomach, and I curl around the tiny life growing there. Our child. The only piece of him I'll have left, if I survive this.
I was coming back, I think desperately, as if he can somehow still hear me. I chose you. I chose us. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
Darkness closes in from all sides, narrowing my vision to a pinprick of fading light. As consciousness slips away, fragments of thought surface through the maelstrom of agony:
The child must survive. That's why she did this. For the child.
But I can't remember whose child. Can't remember why I'm here, or where I came from, or?—
