Quietly, behind him, the shadow moves again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
CHAPTER NINE
Some loves outlive the blade and grave
But the Stars still bind what death can’t save
He lookslike a man who has already decided how this ends.
Not defeated—accepting. And the realization turns her gut.
Elyssara doesn’t move. She only stands over Kael’s frame sprawled on the floor next to a stack of dusty books. She reads the spines.Curses. Divine Afflictions. Magical Possession.
Dread settles into her bones.
“El—” Kael starts, but he cuts himself off when Elyssara’s hand snaps up.
“I said…” she begins, voice too calm to be trusted, “why didn’t you tell me something was wrong?”
He drops his head back, looking up to the Stars for guidance, and blows out a long, heavy breath.Maybe he knows the Stars will never answer. They never have before.
“Because… I didn’t want to concern you. I didn’t want to hurt you,” he answers, voice strained and real.
And for an instant, churning black mixes with the ocean-lightning of his eyes. A tempest of warring elements.
“You didn’t want to hurt me?” she snaps, incredulous.
She scoffs, grabbing her temples as if his words physically pain her.
“So instead of hurting me, you just… cast me aside? Shut me out? Silence ourStarboundtether? Stop touching me? Stoplovingme?” Her voice breaks, fracturing in the same way her heart already has. “We are far beyond hurt, Kael.”
Kael drags himself to his feet, face twisting with repulsion. His eyes are a whirling storm of clashing blacks, blues, and silvers, and they fix on Elyssara like a promise. “Stop loving you? Elyssara, I crave you like the breath in my lungs. Like the blood in my veins. Like fucking survival itself!”
His voice echoes through the high ceiling of the library, muffled only slightly by the thick dust in this forgotten corner, but he doesn’t soften.
But her rage, persistent as it is, doesn’t cower. It rises to meet the moment like a beast waiting to be unleashed from its cage.
“And yet, you’ll shut me out? Leave me to feel the loss of you in every fiber of my being? Leave me at the perimeter of yourself? Leave me to wonder what in the fucking Stars could make me so unlovable that you would recoil from my very touch? All without a single word!” She rasps the words like a curse.
A growl rips from his throat. Animal, savage, instinctive.
But Elyssara steps closer. Unafraid. Unwilling to concede. She bares her teeth.
“I have made a home in every darkness, Kael Thorne. I will make one here with you, too.” Her words rip the tension like a knife through parchment.
Kael lets out a breath, closing his eyes, drinking her words like absolution. Like the sound of her loyalty is his antidote.
Elyssara leans in a little more, hungry for understanding.For him.
“I absorbed a fragment of the Decay, my love. It has burrowed into my veins, my marrow, my mind. It… tries to control me. To direct me toward destruction. Violence. Death.” He looses the explanation and his shoulders drop. Instantly soothed by his own admission.
He absorbed the Decay.
Elyssara’s skin breaks out in gooseflesh. Unsettled. Unnerved by the truth.
She thought it was grief that leashed him. Guilt that he could not save Nalya.Not this.Not the Decay. Not something that had already taken so much from them.
