She had faced the terrors of the Veil. Closed it. Claimed some ancient crown with Alarik.
And not as a prisoner. Not as a pawn.
But as something else entirely.
Queen of the Veil.
The words a blade drove through him.
He’d known something had shifted. The moment their bond snapped like twine too thin to hold, it had left a hollow so vast it echoed. He had thought it a curse, a trick, some foul divine punishment for daring to love her.
But now?
Now he knew.
She had found what was meant for her and in doing so it had changed her.
He gripped the edge of the table, its wood splintering into his flesh.
He didn’t know if it was rage or longing twisting inside him.
The younger boy kept speaking. “They say the king didn’t even fight the demons. She didn’t need him. Left the whole island blooming in her wake.”
Kael’s lip curled.
She had a goddess's blood and now she was something divine. Something farther from him than ever.
But not out of reach.
Not yet.
He rose in one fluid motion, shadow wrapping around him in breathless wind. Coins dropped onto the table in uneven rhythm. The tavern keeper barely noticed as the silver slid across the wood.
Kael stepped into the night swallowed by forest and fog. He moved like a blade through the trees, the pain of his body now lost to his mania, shadows wrapping tighter around him with each step.
What he needed was her.
The path narrowed as cliffs rose on either side, slick with moss.he waterfall thundered in the distance, but Kael ignored it, his boots steady on the uneven stone. The moon had risen high, a pale sickle watching his descent into enemy territory.
He shouldn’t have come alone.
But Kael had no patience for strategy now. No time for diplomacy. Not when the one he would die to protect had become something untouchable.
His wound pulsed in rhythm with the ache in his chest. The bandages had soaked through hours ago. The fae healer who patched him had warned him not to travel again so soon. But what did they know of his kind? Of what it meant to be bound and then severed?
Maris wasn’t just a woman to him.
She was his undoing. His salvation.
His failure.
Every tree branch overhead clawed at the sky like it mourned. Even the birds had gone silent.
He knew what that meant.
The Veil was thinning.
A shiver slid down his spine, and Kael slowed, every sense sharpening. The shadows shifted to his left, not the way wind moves through leaves, but deliberate. Watching. Waiting.
