Page 322 of Blade of the Nightking

Rìan stared after it in stunned silence as the faint splash echoed up from the depths. Slowly, almost mechanically, he turned back to me.

“I never meant to hurt you.” I swiped the blood from my mouth with my sleeve. “I never meant to lie to you. I’ll find a way to make this right again, I swear it. But I won’t break this bond. I… I can’t.”

I tore down every wall around my heart. Every ounce of my regret, my hope, my love, my longing poured through our bond. If words weren’t enough, then I’d let him feel how deeply I meant them.

His fury ebbed, and for one heartbeat there was nothing between us but the terrible, beautiful enormity of what we felt for each other. His fingers slowly uncurled.

Relief swept through me.

And then he lunged.

Within two strides he was there, one hand closing around my jaw as he dropped to his knees before me. Between us, he raised the other—the one bearing the twisting black lines of our bargain. His dark eyes locked on mine as he shoved his blood-slick fingers into my mouth, splitting my bottom lip against my teeth. The coppery sweetness flooded my tongue.

“Fucking drink, Eidra!” His voice splintered to pieces.

He shoved his fingers deeper.

I gagged.

The last thing I felt from him was the enormity of his broken heart as my throat convulsed—and I swallowed.

Pain exploded through my chest, white-hot and blinding, as though invisible hands had reached inside me and seized my very soul. They wrenched at it, pulling harder and harder against something that refused to let go. I tried to scream, but no sound came. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Rìan’s grip vanished.

Stone slammed into my shoulder, then scraped across my cheek, but it seemed to happen to someone else. My body no longer belonged to me. Nothing did. There was only that impossible tearing, ripping deeper and deeper, shredding me apart from the inside.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it vanished. And in its place was something worse.

Emptiness.

I lay where I’d fallen, blinking against the daylight as my magic darted frantically beneath my skin, reaching again and again for the tether that should have been there and finding... nothing.

I pushed myself up, searching at once for Rìan on the other side of the well. He was only feet away, yet it felt as though an entire world had opened between us.

“Rìan...”

Something trembled beneath me.

So faint at first I thought I’d imagined it. Then it came again, a subtle vibration beneath my palms that steadily grew until the flagstones began to rattle.

A low groan rolled through the earth. Dust stirred across the square. The buildings around me began to shudder, loose stone and mortar raining from the walls.

A deafening crack split the air.

Jagged fissures tore outward from the well, racing across the yard as the ground heaved beneath me. They widened rapidly, splitting paving stones apart and swallowing others whole as chunks of earth crumbled into the darkness below.

“Eidra—move!”

Across the well, Rìan leapt to his feet and threw himself clear. I scrambled upright and stumbled toward the city wall as another violent tremor pitched the ground beneath me. I slammed into the stone and turned just as the center of the square gave way.

The well collapsed inward.

Stone and earth plunged into the darkness with a deafening roar as the chasm tore wider, its edge racing across the square toward me.

I flattened myself against the wall, watching helplessly as it came closer.

Twenty feet. Ten.

I squeezed my eyes shut.