“Don’t tell me to stop, asshole!” Her voice rings sharp through the trees.
My world stops turning.She understood me. She understoodVraksûn. That’s not possible.Vraksûnisn’t a language mortals can speak—or even hear properly. To human ears, it sounds like wind blowing through branches, like the creak of ice, like…nothing.
But she did. And she answered.
My breath catches, and suddenly it all makes sense:
The bond intervened. When it sensed my desperation to make her stop, it reached across the space between us and made her understand. Not because she speaks my language, but because she’smine.The magic that ties us together doesn’t careabout linguistics or the rules that govern mortal tongues. It only cares that we’re bound—soul to soul, life to life.
And when I called out to her, the bond answered. It gave her my words—and made them hers. Because that's what mates do. We don't just share a life;we share everything.
My legs threaten to give out. I have to reach for a tree just to keep from collapsing.
She has no idea what just happened between us. She is completely blind to the bond already weaving us together, stitch by stitch.
But I feel it.
Thalûn, I feel it.
She was always meant to understand me—no matter what language my soul speaks.
“Etra’ven, Saelûn,” I whisper. (You found me, soulbond.)
Lumi-
“Don't tell me to stop, asshole.” I spin toward the trees, my voice sharp enough to cut. Silence answers—not the empty kind, but the kind that watches.
“I don’t know what the hell you are, but I’m not in the mood for games.”
No one answers.
“Didn't you hear me?” My voice cracks between fury and grief. “I said he wasmine.You stole him from me!”
I take a step forward. Then another. I don’t know what I’m walking toward, but at this point, I don’t care.
The old warnings whisper through my mind: Don‘t go into the woods after dark. Never go alone.
People disappear in this forest.Bodies turn up… wrong. Touched by something no human can survive. I saw what it did to Mark. His face was shredded, gouge marks trailing from his cheeks all the way down to his chest. His fingernails were splintered and torn away.
It wasn’tthe wounds that made my heart skip though—it was the fact that they were self-inflicted.
What kind of thing can make a grown man tear himself apart?
“If you think killing him makes you my hero, you’re wrong,” I snarl into the dark. “I didn’t need to be saved. I needed revenge.”
A low, choked sound drifts through the trees.
A laugh?
My blood ignites. I shove my knife back into its holster and storm forward, scanning the entire area.
“Come out!” I shout. “If you’re going to laugh at me, do it to my face!”
My boots sink deeper into the drifts as I push past low-hanging branches, my breath fogging in the frigid air. My fists clench at my sides as my heart hammers in my chest.
I don't care what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s got claws or stands twice my height. It took the one thing I've been surviving for—and now it hides?
“I didn’t crawl through two years of hell just to be mocked by something too cowardly to show itself!”
