I pull harder, drawing my blood back toward my palms. It resists, then yields, gathering between my hands in a spinning crimson sphere. My magic follows, violet light wrapping around the blood, containing and transforming it.
The Fade reacts violently—the void churns, reality fracturing around us. Faelan’s projection flickers, his perfect appearance disrupting into something ancient and terrible. For just an instant, I see what lies beneath the glamour—hunger, rage, obsession.
“You cannot sever what you are,” he hisses, voice distorting. “The tether lines run through your bones.”
I center myself in the chaos. The sphere between my palms pulses with my heartbeat. This is my blood. My magic. My life.
“Watch me,” I whisper.
I lift my hands, the sphere of blood and light hovering between them. I can see it now—the fine silver thread connecting it to something beyond my sight. The tether Faelan uses to pull my strings.
The Fade howls—not with a voice, but with presence. The void presses in. My memories blur further. I can barely remember Dane’s face. Ash Hollow feels like a dream I once had.
But I know myself. That can’t be taken.
I stand alone in a circle of burning violet light, the last of my blood hovering between my palms.
“You don’t own me.”
I slash downward with both hands, cutting through the silver thread with blood and will and rage.
Chapter 27
Nova
Fragments surface through the dark.
Dane’s voice first, rough and distant:Stay with me.Then arms—his arms—locked around me, carrying me through space that bent and twisted. The slip coin shattering. Lyanna’s hands glowing gold against my chest while someone held me down. Pain—magic tearing through my veins like molten wire, like my body was trying to turn itself inside out.
Someone saying my name. Over and over. An anchor in the chaos.
Nova. Nova. Stay.
Then nothing. Long stretches of nothing, dark and formless, like floating in a void without edges.
I drift toward consciousness like swimming through tar. Heavy. Slow. Fighting for every inch. Part of me wants to sink back down where it’s quiet, where nothing hurts. But something keeps pulling me up—a warmth at my wrist, a pressure that won’t let go.
The ceiling comes into focus first. Unfamiliar wooden beams, shadows dancing from a low fire. Not my cabin. The scent hits me next: pine and cedar and something distinctlyhim. Wood smoke. Clean sweat. Wolf.
Dane’s cabin. Dane’s bed.
I try to move my hand to my face, but something holds it in place. Not tight. Not painful. Just immovable.
My vision clears.
He sits in a chair pulled close to the bed, elbows on his knees, watching me with that unrelenting stare. His face is drawn, exhaustion carved into the lines around his eyes—deeper than I’ve ever seen them. Dried blood still crusts along his jaw where a gash is half-healed. His clothes are torn, stained with more blood than one person should lose and still be sitting upright.
He came after me. The evidence is written all over him.
His fingers circle my wrist. Thumb pressed directly over my pulse point. Like he’s been counting my heartbeats. Like he hasn’t stopped.
“How long?” My voice comes out wrecked, barely a rasp.
His eyes don’t leave mine. “Seventeen hours.”
The number lands like a physical blow. I try to sit up, and my body screams in protest—every muscle, every joint, every nerve ending lit up with pain. Magic pulses weakly beneath my skin, unstable, sparking in random surges like a downed power line in the rain.
“What happened?”
