But the shadows stirred inside me—alive, whispering, laughing.“You are not.”
“I am not him,” I said, the words tearing out low and ragged. “I will never be Severen. Whatever this power is, whatever it costs, I will not wield it like he does. I swear to you, Amara. I swear.”
The shadows coiled tighter, cold and mocking. They didn’t believe me.
But I had to.
Because if I lost that vow, I had already lost her.
I looked at her—her wrists bruised, her arms marked with iron’s kiss, her breath trembling in her throat. And something inside me cracked.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, though the words shook under the weight of everything we’d survived. “It’s me. I’m still me. I swear it.”
But Amara only shook her head harder, tears spilling in quick, frantic trails. Her gaze dropped, not to my face, but to my arms.
Her voice broke. “Your arms… Lazarus… they’re glowing.”
I looked down.
The veins beneath my skin pulsed black, alive with movement. The sigils crawled, glimmering, twisting and slithering like serpents just beneath the surface.
Amara’s chains rattled as she shrank back into the silks, her breath quickening.
“The black…” she whispered. “It’s all over you. Just like my father had.”
Her gaze fixed on me, her pupils wide, unblinking.
“I remember those coils,” she said softly, almost dreamlike. “I used to trace them when I was little. They curled under his skin like spilled ink that never dried. I thought they were beautiful. He never told me what they were back then. He’d just smile, close his eyes, and let me run my fingers across them like they were harmless.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty—it was heavy, suffocating, filled with the ghosts of everything we could never go back to.
And standing there, my arms blazing with the same cursed marks that had destroyed her father, I finally understood the look in her eyes.
It wasn’t fear of Severen anymore.
It was fear ofme.
Her gaze fell to my arms again, to the coils writhing beneath my skin—slow, deliberate, serpentine. The marks pulsed, as if breathing with me, as if they knew she was watching.
“But I know now,” she whispered, her voice thin, trembling.
“They meant the shadows would listen to him. They meant he could command them.”
Her throat worked, the words scraping raw on the way out.
“And when he fed them… when he gave them what they wanted…”
She lifted her eyes. Tears lingered on her lashes, quivering but never falling.
“They did terrible things.”
I looked down at my own flesh, the coils alive beneath the surface, pulsing with every heartbeat. A monster written into skin. A curse etched in motion.
I forced my gaze back to hers. My chest ached; my throat burned with words that tore their way up like glass.
“I promise you, my love,” I said. “I’m still Lazarus, the man who loves you until death and beyond it.”
Her lips parted, trembling with the weight of everything she couldn’t say. But fear sealed her silence.
