She couldn’t.
Her hands scratched my chest, pulling me closer, her body trembling with need and fear. She was lost in the kiss, desperate, clinging as if she feared I might vanish if she stopped.
She didn’t see the marks crawling higher across my skin.
She didn’t hear the shadows purring inside me, whispering her name as they fed on everything we were.
“I love you,” I murmured, the words searing as they left me. “Not just in this life, but in every one I’ll ever live and every one I’ll be damned to. You are the pulse that keeps me from falling into the dark.”
The words tore out of me like blood—because they were all I had left.
The pit had stripped me bare, carved me hollow, devoured everything that once made me human.
I felt nothing anymore.
No joy. No kindness. No shame. No fear.
All of it burned to ash.
Except her.
The one thing the shadows couldn’t devour.
True love.
She moaned softly against my lips, tears streaking down her cheeks as she clung to me. Her body hummed with fear and longing, but her mouth answered mine, desperate, alive. For a moment, she was the only pulse I knew.
The shadows hissed with delight inside me, purring like beasts that had been fed. They had what they wanted.
I tore my mouth from hers before she could see the truth burning beneath my skin. My chest heaved, lungs scraping raw. The shadows writhed in me, coiling through my ribs, drunk on her kiss.
Amara’s eyes were wide, dazed, glimmering with tears. She reached for me again, but I caught her wrists gently, forcing my voice steady through the chaos inside me.
“Keep searching,” I said. “There has to be something here. A clue. A trace.”
She nodded, shaky and flushed, her breath uneven. Still trembling, she turned back to the shelves, rifling through jars and chests.
I staggered back, clutching the tome against my ribs. My knuckles whitened. The shadows inside me surged, triumphant.
“Beneath the bed. In the stone. Press your hand, and it will open.”
The whisper coiled through me, silk over blades.
My breath caught. I didn’t hesitate.
Crossing the chamber, I dropped to my knees beside the bed—massive, draped in black silks that whispered like dead leaves. Shackles hung from its carved posts, the velvet sheets pooling thick across the floor. The air here was heavy, suffocating, ripe with incense and sweat, the stench of what he’d done.
At first, the stone beneath me looked unbroken. Smooth. Untouched. But as the shadows pressed in, the truth revealed itself—a shimmer, faint and subtle, a seam only the darkness could see.
I laid my palm flat against it.
The slab throbbed beneath my touch like living flesh.
With a deep, grinding groan, it shifted. Dust fell in sheets. The floor split open, yawning wide, hot air rolling out like the breath of something waking.
And there—in the cradle of the dark—the torchlight found it.
The Noctyss flower.
