The sigils branded into her spine and hips blaze through her skin—white-hot, blistering, alive. The remnants of Shackle-Soul inside her—the parasite, the invader, the witch-forged abomination—is no longer merely stirring.
It isclawing.
Her head snaps up, and her eyes, andgods, her eyes…they’re no longer simply grey. They shimmer like split silver, a mirror flickering between worlds, human and unholy all at once.
When she speaks, it is in two voices.
Two beings sharing her tongue.
“You can’t keep her.”
A cold, ancient, coven-born cruelty coils through the room. It dares to speak through her.
ThroughmyElara.
In a blink, I am at her side, on my knees, my hands cupping her face with a gentleness utterly at odds with the savagery rising inside me.
“She’s mine,” I snarl at the thing inside her. “And you do not belong here.”
Her body jerks violently, like a puppet caught between two hands. Her voice fractures on my name. “Lucien?—”
“Elara, you have to fight it,” I growl, thumbs brushing along her jaw, even as my hands tremble with fury I cannot vent on her. “You bound yourself once. You held it quiet for centuries. You can chain it again. Chain and expel it. Now!”
Her back bows again as it has many times this night, and my undead heart bleeds as a scream rips from her throat with the power surging outward. The lights overhead burst in their sockets, glass raining like stars.
“Y-you know what it feeds o-on,” she gasps. “You…y-you know w-what it wants.”
“Then feel me.”
Her eyes are wild, luminous, drowning. “What?—”
“Look at me.” My voice drops to the place beneath anger, beneath desperation, into the guttural register of ancient vows. “Focus on me. On us. On what is real.”
Her breath stutters as I lean in, my mouth brushing hers. The trembling slows. The light inside her gutters like a candle in wind.
I kiss her, slow and grounding and necessary.
Without rage.
Without the sweet, rough force we usually crave.
Just home.
When I draw back, her eyes are clearer, but the sigils beneath her skin still pulse with hungry light.
“It’s not enough,” she whispers. “Lucien—it needs?—”
“I know.”
Before she can protest, I rearrange her over my lap, my cock already surging, surging,surging, and I turn my wrist and pierce the vein with my fangs.
My blood, thick and ancient, black-red as midnight wine, wells up, carrying everything that I am, everything I have survived: the curses, the blessings, the venom, the centuries of sharpened power, the night-fire carved into me by time itself.
I press my bleeding wrist to her mouth.
She hesitates for half a heartbeat before instinct and terror and something deeper take over.
She drinks.
