I glance back at her, searching for the lie. “A fucking nunnery.”
“Yes. At the heart ofSaint Obscurais a cloister of witches sworn to holy vows stridently enforced by the coven.” Her mouth curves in bitter irony. “They guard the veil between life and death.”
She exhales, a shudder running through her as if even speaking it reopens an ancient wound. And I don’t have time to snarl that I don’t need a refresher of the past before she’s reciting it, reliving it for the both of us.
“We broke the sacred law, Lucien. The one written in blood before either of our kinds learned to speak. No witch may bind her essence to a creature of the dark. No vampire may share his blood with a witch, except in hunger.”
Her voice falters, quiet but unflinching.
“I took your blood in love under the full moon. You took mine at dawn with a vow of forever. For one breath, we were neither mortal nor immortal, neither witch nor vampire. We were something new, something the coven feared could unmake the balance they swore to protect.”
She lifts her gaze to mine, eyes bright with pain and defiance.
“We laughed and fucked and feasted as we reveled in the forbidden. And, perhaps that’s what angered them most. They said we’d tainted the boundary between life and death. That ourunion was blasphemy. So they came to cleanse it with your ashes and my silence.”
The words hit me like fangs to the throat.
I take a step forward. “And during that fucking and laughing and feasting, we also made an oath, Elara. To spend eternity together or not at all. So how can I not think youchoseto leave me?”
“Because I was a coward in the end, Lucien. I couldn’t…couldn’t bear to see you perish, even if I perished right alongside you. So yes, I chose to save you,” she announced, defiant and beautiful chin aloft. “And I chose to save countless others. Because if they’d killed you, your kind would’ve unleashed hell on the living. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“And so you let me think you betrayed me.”
“I didn’t let you. I couldn’t reach you.”
I stare at her, every muscle in my body strung tight. “You think that makes it better?”
“No,” she says quietly. “But it’s the truth.”
Her calm infuriates me. That unshakable stillness, the same one she used to wield when she knew she was right. I want to tear it apart. I want to shake her until she breaks and tells me what I really need to hear—that she suffered, that she missed me, that she dreamed of me through every endless night.
Instead, she stands there in my shirt, smelling like lilies and ruin, and looks at me as if she can still see the man beneath the monster.
“I dreamed of you,” she says suddenly, voice barely above a whisper.
I go still. And yes, she’s a witch so it speaks to reason that she reads minds now, too.
“Every night,” she continues. “In the dark, I’d see your face. I thought it meant the spell hadn’t erased me entirely. That some part of you might still remember.”
“I remembered,” I say hoarsely. “But not kindly.”
“I know.”
Her honesty is worse than her silence.
The fire crackles and pops.
Outside, the first slant of morning light cuts through the clouds, slicing across her bare legs. I watch her flinch as it touches her skin—old instinct, even if the spell has altered her now. She learned to love the dark but she never suffered in the light.
I step closer, slow, deliberate. “Show me,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“The spell. The marks it left.”
She hesitates. Then, wordlessly, she lifts her shirt. Drops it. Then she pivots slowly on the balls of her feet.
The breath leaves my chest.
