Kaelric’s golden healing light began to pour from his hands, spreading like liquid sunlight over my skin, but I felt Valkaryn sharp and hot in my mind.
‘No. That will purge the venom,’she warned, her voice edged with urgency.
“Sto…p,” I panted to Kaelric weakly. “No.”
He peered down at me, his eyes a war of orange and green. They were filling with tears, and he blinked rapidly, until they splashed onto my cheeks.
Somehow, seeing Kaelric cry was more heartbreaking than seeing Cassian. There was a heavier weight to it.
“Trust… me. Stop,” I said again, and the healing light stopped in an instant, dissolving into the night.
Kaelric fell to his knees with me in his arms, tears flowing down his face and onto my chest. His voice broke as he spoke into my ear, his chest trembling beneath my cheek: “You were enough for me just as you were, Brynn,” he wept. “I would have lived a lifetime without children, without bedding you, and still it would have been enough.”
They were the most beautiful words anyone had ever said to me, warm and devastating and tender all at once. The last words I heard before my soul left my body.
Chapter Eleven
Iwas back inside the Steel Mountain, before the man with the golden glass eyes who stood in an endless white marble palace. The cavernous space around us gleamed—walls of stone veined with soft white luminescence.
He stood in his ancient armor and peered down at me with compassion.
Light pooled at his feet like living mist, stirring as though drawn toward breath.
I glanced down, wiggling my fingers and toes. My body was normal, no skin punctured, no blood from Elia’s bites. I felt weightless, yet whole.
“Am I dead?” I asked the man in shock.
He cocked his head to the side. “Technically, yes.”
No…
It didn’t work. Elia hadn’t bitten me enough times, or maybe she did too many. Panic closed around me like a vise.
I realized in that moment who I stood before, and fell to my knees before the Creator himself.
“I have to go back. My mother, my siblings, Kaelric needs me—his aunt, the people of Lunaria.I beg you, send me back.”
My voice cracked, the words tumbling from me raw and desolate.
“That’s not how it usually works. Coming here is a one-way street,” he announced.
I glanced up at him in shock, my pulse roaring in my ears—though I wasn’t sure I had a heart anymore.
“No.” I stood, suddenly desperate. “I thought this was how I was supposed to be. A wolfkin. Otherwise, why would Kaelric and I be mates?”
He peered down at me, and I was surprised by the compassion in his gaze. A deep knowing sat behind his eyes, ancient, unmovable, but not unkind.
“What if I told you that Kaelric’s soul was not meant to be wolfkin, that he was supposed to be born of Valkaryn when she was human with a different father, andthenyou were supposed to meet and marry and have children?”
I gasped.
The revelation struck like lightning through still air.
Was Val never supposed to be a wolfkin either? Somewhere, in another thread of time, would she have met a different man, and Kaelric would have been born of that coupling? Human born? My mind spun, trying to fit this truth into the world I knew. None of it made sense, yet it explained everything and nothing all at once. Maybe Valkaryn and Drake were never supposed to be mates, or maybe the Creator knew what would happen to Val, and so he allowed it.
I didn’t know.
But right now, all that mattered was getting back to Kaelric and the others.
