The book responded to her like a familiar. The leyline responded to her like a beacon, and whatever entity had torn through her family’s ritual responded to her like a threat.
He exhaled slowly. Poppy Sinclair was not the center of a massacre. She was the eye of a storm. A living shield who, without fully knowing it, had pushed back something ancient enough to rattle continents.
When dawn finally brushed pale blue across the curtains, Mingxi was still there—silent, vigilant, watching her breathe. Exactly where he promised he’d be.
Poppy woke slowly, drifting up from warm, dreamless dark. For one blissful second, she had no memory of rituals or revenants or the cold echo of the entity’s hunger.
Then she felt it—a presence.
Non-threatening. Not looming. Simply… there.
Her eyes fluttered open.
Mingxi was exactly where she had left him, sitting in the low chair beside her bed, elbows on his knees, amber eyes steady on her. He didn’t look startled to see her wake—if anything, he looked relieved.
“You stayed,” she whispered, voice scratchy from sleep.
“I told you I would.” His voice was light, and something softened in his expression. “You slept deeply.”
She blinked at him, the edges of sleep still fogging her thoughts.
“You watched me the whole time?”
“Yes.”
He said it without embarrassment. Without apology. As though it were only natural to stand guard over her for hours.
A warmth bloomed low in her chest. Small. Dangerous. Insistent.
Most people in her life had treated her as an afterthought—a burden, a placeholder. Something useful, never precious. But Mingxi…he watched her sleep like her breathing mattered. No one had ever made her feel safe by simply existing beside her.
She swallowed, her voice barely a breath. “You didn’t have to.”
“I did,” he said quietly, and there was something new in his tone—something fierce beneath the gentleness. “Your magic is unstable after awakening. You were vulnerable. And…” His eyes flicked to hers, holding. “You should never have to face the aftermath of what happened alone.”
Poppy’s throat tightened. It was ridiculous to feel anything for a man she barely knew. Ridiculous to feel her pulse flutter at his words. Ridiculous to want to lean into the warmth of his presence—to bask in it like a starving creature who’d finally found a flame that didn’t burn.
Yet, she realized with a slow, quiet certainty, she felt safer waking up in his presence than she had ever felt in her entire life. Not safe because he was powerful, but safe because he chose to watch over her.
She pushed a strand of ash-brown hair behind her ear, suddenly shy in a way that felt foreign.
“You didn’t leave,” she murmured again, softer this time.
“No,” he said. “And I won’t.”
The words slipped into her heart like sunlight through frost, and Poppy fell in love—not all at once, not with a grand declaration, but in a tiny, irrevocable shift.
A single heartbeat.
A single breath.
A single truth.
He stayed.
Chapter 34
A soft knock sounded. Mingxi tensed as he walked towards the door. Then a familiar warmth brushed his senses, bright and unmistakable, and his posture eased.
