“Elyssara—move!”
The warning barely reaches her before something crashes into the space between them.
Jax.
The force of her arrival is immediate and violent, magic ripping through her in a surge that does not belong to her alone. Elyssara feels it the moment it hits—her own power, torn from her grasp and channeled through another body, amplified, sharpened, redirected.
Jax drives it forward without hesitation.
The blast hits Kael head-on, Light colliding with shadow in a violent rupture that blasts him backward, the force of it ripping through the ground beneath him as he’s thrown clear of Elyssara’s position.
He lands hard.
“Now, Teddy!” Jax shouts, her voice a rasping, wretched shriek.
Teddy grimaces, and he growls, like he’s at war with himself. Hating himself. Desperate for… something. Anything else.
And that’s when Elyssara realizes. Teddy has decided: Kael is unreachable. Lost.Gone. And something inside him looks like it’s being carved out with every step he takes toward Kael.
Teddy is going to kill him.
One hand grips the haft of his axe tighter, the other rips at his own hair. Tormented, torn, but his legs don’t stop moving.
Teddy stalks toward Kael, axe hanging from his hands.
He roars in self-hatred, veins protrude from his neck, sweat beads at his brow, but it is the tears that stream down his face that draw Elyssara’s gaze. Because this is Kael. Kael, who stood beside him through every impossible battle. Kael, who carried him through grief. Kael, who trusted him enough to hand him command of his armies and the lives within them.
And Teddy is about to bury an axe in his chest.
Their eyes meet. Teddy’s burnished bronze gaze lands on her with a thousand words hanging in them. Elyssara does not hear him, but she knows the words that slip past his lips. “I’m sorry,” he mouths.
Not to Elyssara.
To Kael.
Realization dawns. Horror burrows into her bones. For a moment, everything stills.
Elyssara’s breath catches, her magic faltering just enough for something else to slip through the space between them.
A thread.
Thin.
Fragile.
Familiar.
It brushes against her like a whisper across her skin.
Elyssara.
The sound is not spoken—it is felt.
A whisper that ghosts through her mind. Barely there. Not enough to hold onto.
Heard somewhere deeper than her ears, felt somewhere deeper than blood or flesh or bone—carried along the tether that has always existed between them, no matter how broken it has become.
Her chest tightens.
