Multiple threads, white and black intertwined, wrapping around her like hands catching her before she fell. Tethering her. Holding her together when she should have been fragmenting.
And shadows. His shadows. Weaving through the threads. Dark and protective and possessive.
Claiming her.
Marking her as his.
Refusing to let the courts have even a single piece of what belonged to him.
Stay with me.His voice came from somewhere. Distant. Rough.Desperate in ways she'd never heard from him.Don't you dare leave me.
The threads strengthened. More appeared, branching out like roots or veins. A whole network forming around her. Catching every piece. Holding her together.
Pulling her toward her body.
She could sense it now. Distant but approaching. The physical form she'd left behind. There. Intact. Breathing somehow. Heart beating when it should have stopped.
Because he was keeping it alive.
Thief. Steal this. Steal my power. Steal my immortality. Steal whatever you need to come back to me.
His voice again. Broken. Raw.
And through the connection forming between them, she felt what he wasn't saying. What it was costing him.
His body was failing. She could sense his hands shaking against her physical form, his breath coming ragged, his heartbeat growing erratic. Power flowing out of him in torrents. Not a stream. A flood. Everything he was pouring into her with no thought for what it would leave behind.
He was emptying himself. Draining his own existence to fill the void in hers.
He was dying. Giving her his life because he couldn't bear to watch her lose hers.
He wasn't just saving her. He was trading himself for her.
No. No, you stubborn, impossible?—
She pulled harder along the threads. Moving faster toward her form. Toward him. If she could get back, maybe she could stop him. Make him stop giving. Make him keep enough to survive.
The shadows helped. Guiding her. Supporting her. Like hands pulling her home.
Her awareness touched her form.
The reconnection snapped into place like a bone setting.
Cold.
That was the first thing. The stone beneath her back, the airagainst her skin, her own flesh somehow freezing from the inside. Cold like she'd never be warm again.
Then everything else crashed in. Weight. Lungs burning for air. Her heart stuttering, forgetting its rhythm, finding it again. Pain radiating from her chest where Caelum had struck.
Her back arched against stone. Air rushed into her lungs in a gasping breath.
Alive.
But changed.
She could feel him. Inside her. Part of her now.
Not beside her.Inside.
