The words sent a faint, uneasy ripple through me. I tried to focus, but the edges of his form were already beginning to blur. “What do you mean?” I asked, though even speaking felt like reaching through water.
His jaw tightened, as though the answer sat just beyond what he was allowed to share. “Pay attention to your world,” he said. “Watch it carefully. Things are changing.”
A faint frown pulled at my thoughts. “Because of the spell?”
His gaze flickered—confirmation, hesitation, something unspoken all at once. “It may not have affected only this place.”
The weight of that settled uneasily over me. “I know I need to be careful,” I murmured with a tired edge of wryness, though I wasn’t certain which of him I meant anymore.
Something in his expression shifted, growing sharper, more urgent. “Yes, you do.” The low, insistent words were threaded with something dangerously close to warning, as though there was more he wasn’t saying.
He reached out to grasp my other hand, holding both tightly. His lips parted, as though he wanted to say something else, but the drowsiness surged and the world slipped further from my grasp.
The stars dissolved into blurred light, the wind into a distant whisper, the solid presence of Evander the only thing that remained clear. The last thing I felt before the darkness claimed me was the warmth of his hands wrapped around mine…and the quiet, unshakable certainty that whatever had formed between us was not a dream, but real.
But if this was real…then what had I been living in?
CHAPTER 18
It was becoming harder and harder to emerge from the cursed sleep, as though I were swimming through an ocean of endless darkness with no shore, no surface, no end. It pressed against me from every side—heavy and smothering, muffling the world and dulling my senses. Even my own body felt distant, as though I were drifting somewhere far beyond my reach.
Then, through the endless expanse, something changed—the steady, unmistakable warmth of an embrace enfolded me, the arms around me firm and real in a place where nothing else felt certain.
“Mirelle?Mirelle?” That voice emerged through the haze as though from a great distance, faint and blurred by the weight of sleep, yet I knew it at once.
My breath caught as awareness rushed back. I forced my eyes open. Light spilled into my vision—too bright and flat, stripped of the depth and softness of the world I had just left behind. The ceiling loomed above me, solid and unyielding. Real, and yet somehow it felt like the imitation.
The memory of the other world flickered through me: cool air against my skin, starlight glistening across the stone, the quietcertainty of something living and true. That world had been vivid, but this one felt dulled, as though someone had blurring the edges with a paintbrush and trimmed away everything that made it feel alive.
Even now, the memory of the stars above the balcony lingered more sharply than the room around me, while the world I had supposedly returned to already felt distant. Worst of all, the pull of sleep hadn’t fully released me. It still tugged insistently at me, as though some part of me remained caught between worlds.
I shifted slightly, then went still as the realization seized me all at once: I wasn’t alone. A steady arm was wrapped around me, firm enough to have caught me and held me in place. My head rested against something warm and solid, the only truly tangible detail in the fog still clouding my senses.
Evander.
My heart stuttered, but I didn’t pull away. Sleep still beckoned, trying to lure me under again, yet his presence held me here, an anchor in a reality that no longer felt entirely my own.
“You’re awake,” he murmured. There was no teasing or careful guarded edge, only relief drawn taut enough to make something in my chest tighten.
His voice came from just above me. I tilted my head just enough to look at him and found him already watching me, his grey eyes fixed on mine as though he had been waiting for the moment I awoke. For a breath, neither of us moved. The stillness between us felt strangely fragile, as though even the slightest shift might shatter something neither of us yet understood.
“How long?” My voice sounded distant, as though it belonged to someone else.
He released an unsteady breath. “Not long.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “You collapsed.” I felt his arms tighten almost imperceptibly around me.
“So I gathered,” I said. “It appears that collapsing without warning is a habit I’ve acquired.”
I expected the quip to earn at least the shadow of a smile, but his expression remained grave, almost…worried. Surely I was imagining that. I had to remind myself that this was the man who had admitted he had an agenda, whose charm was nothing more than a deliberate tactic to achieve his ends. A man whose counterpart in the dream had warned me was selfish, dangerous, and not to be trusted.
I should have moved away from him at once. Instead, I stayed exactly where I was. Only then did I become fully aware of how close we were, of the hand still rested at my waist, of the warmth of his body beneath my cheek, and of the fact that he hadn’t let go. For one reckless moment, I allowed myself to remain there, grounded and held, as though I had found the one place in this unraveling world where I did not have to fight to keep my balance.
“You didn’t have to catch me,” I managed breathlessly, though the words emerged softer and far less sharply than I intended.
His gaze didn’t leave mine. “Of course I did.”
Something in his expression captured my attention. It wasn’t the familiar mask I’d grown accustomed to, but something more strained beneath it, unguarded enough to unsettle me. Strange how quickly I noticed the absence of his teasing. For how much it had once irritated me, I found I almost missed that part of him now.
Nothing about this felt the way it should.
