Page 139 of His Eternal Claim

Minutes dissolve into hours. The doctors work around me, and when the bleeding stops, they leave us in heavy silence I fill with my breathless gasps.

I lean forward, burying my face against the edge of the mattress, my forehead nearly touching his hip. The hollow inside me aches like a terminal sickness carved into my ribs. I don’t need answers right now. I don’t need to discuss the massacre, or the lies, or the ghosts that Hannah populated my head with. I just need him to breathe.

I refuse to let them bandage my wounds until I know he’s alive and breathing.

A shift in the room’s gravity makes my eyes snap open.

The heart monitor’s rhythm spikes, a frantic visual pulse. I lift my head. Zagreus’s thick, dark eyelashes flutter against his pale cheekbones. His jaw locks, and a muscle ticks beneath the scar on his face. The scar I gave him. I swallow.

Before his eyes even open, his hand twitches in mine and his fingers flex.

He lunges upward against the pillows with a strangled gasp, his chest heaving as his stormy grey eyes scan the empty space of the room. He isn’t looking at the monitors or the IV lines. He is searching for a ghost. He’s searching for me. His dilated pupils are black, blind with a panic I have never seen on him.

“Selene—”

My name leaves his lips, raw with the terror that I was just another ghost born of his blood loss. His free hand wildly reaches out into the empty air, searching, clawing for a sanity he thinks he ruined.

“I’m here,” I whisper.

I lunge forward, catching his reaching hand with both of mine, pressing his palm flat against my cheek. I slide my fingers up to the back of his neck, pulling myself into his orbit until my forehead crashes against his.

Zagreus freezes. His fingers dig into my jaw, into my hair, his rough thumb tracking the damp, salt-stained skin of my cheek. He inhales sharply, his chest crashing hard against my breasts, holding me so tightly against his heavy heartbeat that the stitches in his side pull. He drinks in the scent of me.

He doesn’t speak or ask if I remember.

His eyes lock onto mine. He just stares into my soul, verifying the fracture, checking the dilation of my pupils until he sees the recognition shining through my tears. He sees the firecracker he branded.

A broken exhale escapes his lips, his broad shoulders shaking violently against mine as he buries his face into the crook of my neck. His grip on my waist is a vice, an eternal claim that overrides every rule of this world we built and destroyed together.

I close my eyes, tangling my fingers into the dark, damp waves at the nape of his neck, holding him back with the same desperate, mutual madness. The trauma can wait. The reckoning can wait. Right now, there are only the two fractured pieces of a violent universe finally breathing the exact same air.

And for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, neither of us let go.

Not even an inch. Because after everything we’ve survived—the lies, the blood, the graves, the ghosts. Being together feels less like love, and more like coming home.

Chapter 52

Fell In Love With You

THE MAESTRO | Present

Three days.

Three fucking days since the world tore itself apart in that rainy alley. Three days since Hannah Visconti and Vane Davenport became stains on the pavement. Three days since my wife shattered the chemical locks in her mind and remembered every beautiful, devastating thing we ever were.

And in those three days, Selene has barely spoken fifty words. The high-priced psychiatrist the Syndicate kept on retainer tries to tell me it is a textbook defense mechanism. I have my hand wrapped around his silk tie, pulling his face inches from mine until he can smell the stale tobacco and dried adrenaline on my skin.

“This is a normal response, Mr. Vitale,” he says, his voice thin with calm. “Given everything she’s endured—”

“Normal?” I growl, the stitches in my side pulling with a fierce, cold bite. “There is nothing normal about what they did to her.”

The doctor’s medical degree doesn’t stop his pulse from hammering against his collar. “She is processing years of manufactured trauma, systematic memory suppression, and profound, buried grief all at once, Mr. Vitale. The mind protects itself through catatonia when the reality is too loud to bear.”

He swallows hard, trying to regain his professional composure. “Give her time.”

Time.

The one concept I have spent my entire life weaponizing or ignoring. Time doesn’t heal a goddamned thing. Time rots. Time turns fresh trauma into jagged, infected scars that eventually poison the bloodstream.