For a long moment, only the fire answered. Spitting, crackling, throwing its restless light across her face. Then Willa’s mouth moved again, voice distant.
“Even nightmares, blind and few,have qualms that run deep, run true.For what fears love,and loves the fear, leaving its mark unseen, but clear.Two can be one,but one can’t be known.Only when they’ve met their match,will the divine become its own.”
With his heart hammering against his ribs, Ronan stepped closer. “So, she isn’t damned, she can be saved?”
There was a tug down the bond. His breath caught, chest seizing. Verena. He felt her searching for him, her presence heightening inside him, familiar, fierce, so achingly hers.
But there was something else, another, latched around her like chains. Dark and merciless, pulling hard against the tether until it was no longer her warmth he felt, but something vast and cold, trying to bend it. Control it.
He staggered, a curse rasping from his throat. He reached back down the bond, desperate for her, desperate for even a fragment that washersagain. But the corruption only tightened, swallowing until it smothered.
Willa’s voice came soft, almost pitying, though she didn’t look away from the fire. “One of them can be.”
Elysian sat rigid, knuckles white on his blade, sensing the shift. Ronan clenched his fists, jaw locked, every instinct screaming to launch into the sky, to tear through whatever had its hold on her. But the bond burned cold, and the more he fought it, the more it seared where it only should have numbed.
His eyes squeezed closed, smoke tight around him, and he thought he might choke on the reality. Because for the first time, he didn’t know if it was Verena he felt—or the Viper.
The questions drove him mercilessly mad. How much could prophecy forgive? And could fate, unyielding, unrelenting fate, ever truly be rewritten?
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Verena
IDIDN’T REMEMBER LEAVING CAMP.
One blink, there was a fire crackling beyond the pixie tent where I slept, Elva’s soft breathing at my back. The next, I stood knee-deep in twilight mist, bare feet sinking beneath stone where a ghost-trail of smoke and spice lingered.
A lake yawned open before me, moonlight fractured across its black surface. It looked like a mirror waiting to drown its own reflection. I dared to lean forward, to see what stared back—
The first thing I lost was my breath. It didn’t flee, it was stolen, dragged from my lungs. That was when the whisper came, a slick breeze of numb twisting up my spine.
You’ve wandered so far, so close, so…wrong.
I gripped the stone beside me. “You don’t decide where I belong,” I forced out, though my voice tangled with a hiss.
Don’t I?it said.
My vision blurred, pupils thinning to lethal slits. The water shuddered as if it feared what stared out through my eyes.
Ronan’s voice was a distant storm thundering at the edges of my mind.
Verena.
A snarl of static seared across the bond, cutting him off. The connection twisted, strained, a dark presence sinking its teeth into the tether between us. I reached for him. For the heat. For the anchor—
But the curse sank its defilement deeper, dragging me down with it. The lake rippled outward, ring after ring, a fissure stirring beneath its depths as a distant call whistled from behind me.
This no longer felt like losing control, but more like removing the muzzle, tasting the darkness, bittersweet and too damn addictive.
The Viper exhaled in delight.Good girl.
And just before the corruption swallowed the last piece of me, a flicker of green-gold light surged down the bond. Ronan, calling me back.
The curse twisted and I lent it my smile.
Try not to scream.
The voice boomed through my thoughts, so suddenly the heavy tome slipped from my hands and hit the floor with a crack.
