They were coming for me.
Of course, they were. The bond that had formed between us wasn’t easily broken. Not by distance, not by doubt, not even by my deliberate choice to walk away.
I pressed my hand against the massive door, feeling the weight of it, the age of it, the history contained in its ornately carved surface. Beyond it lay the city, and the possibility of enough distance that the bond’s pull might fade to something manageable. Something I could think through rather than simply feel through.
The door swung open under my touch, easier than it should have been, as if the palace itself had decided to let me go.
Night air hit me like a physical blow… cool against my overheated skin, fresh after the perfumed confines of the ballroom and the enclosed intimacy of Kael’s quarters. I drew it into my lungs, three counts in, hold for four, release for five, steadying myself as best I could against the next wave of heat building inside me.
My scent hit the air unfiltered, uncontained, raw in a way that made the fresh air overly perfumed.
For one terrible, wonderful moment, I felt myself surrender. Not my mind—that remained stubbornly, fiercely my own—but my body yielding to what it had been designed for across centuries of careful breeding. My head turned without conscious command, looking back toward the depths of the palace where I knew they waited, where completion beckoned with the promise of balance I’d never known before tonight.
I saw them.
All three converging on a single point. Me.
In that moment of clarity, caught between surrender and flight, I made my choice.
I stepped through the doorway into the night.
I would return once my heat was over.
The cool air embraced me, carrying my scent outward in concentric waves that would mark my passage for anyone with the ability to track it. The heat didn’t fade as I moved away from the palace and the princes. If anything, it intensified, my body rebelling against the choice my mind had made with increasing desperation. Each step away from them felt like tearing something essential, like deliberately breaking what had only just been made whole. The pain of it was both physical and something beyond physical…a sundering at the level of my identity.
But with each step, something else grew stronger alongside the pain. Certainty. Not that I was making the right choice or the wrong one, but that I was making a choice at all. That whatever happened next would be because I had decided it should happen.
I was twenty steps from the palace gates when I felt the bond collapse. I felt each prince’s distinct energy fade from my awareness in sequence… Kael’s authority receding first, then Rhex’s intensity, finally Silas’s perception, until all thatremained was the ghost-sensation of where they had been inside me.
The emptiness that followed was absolute. Devastating. A vacuum where completion had been moments before.
I stumbled, my hand finding the stone wall of the outer gate to steady myself against the vertigo of sudden isolation. For so many years, I had been alone inside myself, cut off from my own nature by chemical suppression and calculated control. Tonight I had experienced a connection so profound it had transformed me at the molecular level, had rewritten what I understood about myself and my place in the world. And now that connection was gone, torn away by my own decision to walk rather than stay.
The pain of it dropped me to my knees.
My body screamed, demanding I return instead of facing the pain of incompletion after having known, however briefly, what completion felt like. It didn't matter that I'd already resolved myself to reuniting with the princes after my heat, the pain of returning to a state I had lived in all my life but could no longer accept as natural now that I had experienced its alternative doubled me over.
I knelt on the cold stone of the palace gate, head bowed not in submission but in grief. The heat remained, burning through me with increasing intensity now that there was nothing to channel it, to focus it on, to make it meaningful beyond simple biology.
I rose slowly, each movement deliberate against the protest of flesh that wanted something other than what my mind had decided. Three counts in. Hold for four. Release for five. The familiar rhythm steadied me enough to take another step, and another, away from the palace, and away from the princes.
Behind me, I felt rather than heard the palace doors open. Their scent reached me even at this distance. I didn’t look back. I knew what I would see if I did… three princes standing in thedoorway, their expressions carrying the specific pain of having glimpsed completion only to have it torn away.
But I kept walking.
Because whatever we had become in the space of a single extraordinary night, whatever ancient pattern had awakened between us… it had to be chosen. Freely. With clear eyes and full understanding. Not in the grip of heat, not under the influence of biology that bypassed thought, not in the moment when surrender felt more like inevitability than decision.
I would return. I already knew I would. But I would return as myself, not as biology’s puppet. I would return having chosen, not having yielded.
But not tonight. Tonight was for remembering who I was before I decided who I would become.
CHAPTER 19
Imoved through the midnight streets like a fever dream… something half-real, half-imagined, visible only in fragments through the haze of heat that distorted everything around me. My skin burned where the night air touched it, each brush of fabric against my body registering as both torment and relief.
Three counts in. Hold for four. Release for five.
The rhythm steadied me, if only for moments at a time. I pushed forward, each step deliberate against the liquid weakness in my knees. The main thoroughfare curved ahead, bright with lanterns that illuminated far too much. I veered left instead, into narrower passages where shadows gathered thick enough to offer the illusion of concealment. The cobblestones beneath my feet seemed to register my passing, each step sending vibrations up through my legs that resonated with the fire in my blood.
