The pain is a living thing.
It crawls through my chest where Viktor’s blade opened me, not clean, not quick, but tearing, dragging across ribs that shouldn’t break but do anyway because the weapon remembers what mortality tastes of. Blood, actual human blood, warm, red, and terrifyingly finite, soaks through my shirt, dripping onto concrete that’s already slick with violence.
I’m on my knees.
On my knees.
Thousands of years of existence, and I’ve never been brought this low. The Binding stripped my power, carved out centuries of dominance, and left behind something that bleeds, something that hurts, something that canbreak. Viktor stands over me, the Original-forged blade dripping with my blood, and his smile is pure triumph wrapped in centuries of resentment.
“Pathetic,” he spits. “The great Draven, reduced to nothing. You’re not even worth killing slowly.”
He raises the blade.
And then I feel it.
Sloane.
The sensation slams into me through the Heart Bind with the force of a freight train made of fire, fury, and absolute, devastating power. Sloane’s Bloodfire erupts across our connection, not tentative, not controlled, but roaring through the invisible thread that ties us together. It’s not just her magic. It’sher. Every ounce of determination, every fragment of love, every piece of the woman who chose to stand beside a monster instead of running screaming into the night.
The power flows into me.
No.
Not into me.
Through me.
It doesn’t heal the wounds Viktor’s blade carved into my flesh. The Original-forged weapon made those injuries permanent. But Sloane’s magic doesn’t try to fix what’s broken. Instead, it wraps around the damage, shores up what remains, fills the hollow spaces where my strength used to live with something new.
Something impossible.
Something neither vampire nor witch, but both, fused into an entity that shouldn’t exist outside of myth.
My vision sharpens. Colors explode across my sight, not the muted tones of vampire perception, but Sloane’s Crimson Sight bleeding through our connection. I see Viktor as she sees him, a writhing mass of corrupted blood, ancient, feral, and arrogant. I see the weakness in his stance, the micro-hesitation before each strike, the patterns of his movement laid bare in ways my millennia of combat experience never revealed.
Her humanity tempers my hunger.
My immortality, what’s left of it, stabilizes her magic.
The fusion completes with a sensation that makes reality shudder, and suddenly, I’m not just me anymore.
We’re us.
I rise.
Viktor’s smile falters.
“Impossible,” he murmurs, but the word carries the weight of a man watching his certainty crumble in real time. “The Binding—”
“Is still in place,” I say, and my voice carries an echo of Sloane’s power, layered and beautiful. “I’m still diminished. Stillmortal enough to bleed. But you made one critical mistake, brother.”
I take a step forward, and the movement is fluid in ways it hasn’t been since the Binding took hold. Not because my Original power returned, it didn’t, but because Sloane’s magic fills the gaps, compensates for what’s missing, creates something entirely different in the process.
“You assumed she was my weakness.” I take another step. Blood dripping from my wounds, but it doesn’t matter anymore. “You were wrong.Sheis my strength.”
Viktor snarls, all pretense of civility shattering, and lunges with the blade.
But this time, I see it coming.
