“I love you,” he chokes. “I need you— Nalya, you can’t?—”
Crimson bleeds through the fabric at her wrists now.
“Our lives aren’t bound anymore. Let me go, Kael.”
He brushes the dark strands from her forehead.
“I can’t,” he admits, and the words sound like confession.
He drops his head to hers.
But rage flares hot and sharp. Uncontainable. Unending.
He tips his head back, and a roar rips from his throat. But it’s interrupted by a sob. The sound tears through him—raw, unguarded. It wracks his body so violently he jolts forward.
“I cannot live in this world, Kael.”
A breath.
“Not with the way it lives in me.”
Like it has rooted itself into her bones and refuses to be anything but this.
She lifts a heavy arm, her palm finding Kael’s stubbled cheek.
“He made this world feel like something I have to survive… even when I’m safe.”
Blood runs in rivers down her forearm, disappearing beneath the sleeve of her gown, the fabric soaked through. Her honey skin is void of warmth, life and light draining from her with every heartbeat.
“I cannot know peace here. Let me have peace.”
Her arm drops. Not by choice, by gravity. Not a moment she can stop. Not one he can catch.
“Please,” she breathes. “Give me this.”
A whimper leaves her.
“I don’t want to be brave anymore.”
He sees it then—the exhaustion. The kind of bone-deep tired that sleep can’t touch.
The kind that soft hands and safe walls can’t undo. The kind that comes from being hollowed out slowly. Piece by piece. Until there is nothing left inside you that feels like it belongs to you.
The way Maldrak swallowed her whole—took the goodness in her and turned it into something fragile. Something punishable. Took the parts of her that were light, and melted them down like metal at a forge, reshaped them until she no longer recognized what she’d become.
Until his voice sounded like her own.
Until his cruelty felt like truth.
Until survival meant becoming smaller. Quieter. Easier to break.
“Just… stay with me.”
Notsave me.
Nothelp me.
Stay.
