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Even after they’d crashed back together in a tangle of limbs and apologies and desperate, shaking hands. Even after her mouth on his had burned away the last of the chill that had lodged in his bones since Castle Lumin. His relief had been so big, so sharp, it was almost painful.

She was safe and she was here and she was with him again.

He tried not to dwell on everything that lived between those facts.

He failed.

Throat tight, Cedric pressed his lips together, like doing so might contain the well of emotion threatening to spill forth. How close had he come to never having this again? To never feeling her against him, never hearing her voice in his ears or in his mind, never seeing the specific smirk she seemed to reserve just for him?

Cedric thought he knew what it was to have his power ignite, to have the furnace in his chest spark uncontrollably. But nothing could have prepared him for the way it had surged through him the moment he’d locked eyes with Elyria in Castle Lumin, bound in Malakar’s sick shadows.

Cedric Thorne was a knight of the realm. He was trained to do good, to be steadfast and honorable and just. He had pursued all things in his life with this in mind—he was always inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt, even when duty dictated otherwise. It was one of the reasons it hadn’t been such a terribly hard thing, in retrospect, to come to grips with the fact that the truths he’d been told about Arcanians—about Elyria, the Revenant, herself—were not actual truth.

He had long prided himself on being the sort of man who moved with care and consideration, who did not allow his emotions to control him, who did not act without thinking.

But when it came to Elyria, there was no need for thought. Cedric ran on nothing but instinct. And there was no controlling the power spearing through his veins as he’d watched her being dragged behind those doors.

The instant he’d seen his solimaeus being taken from him again, any semblance of mercy he might have been otherwise inclined to show had disappeared with her. Whatever restraint he might have possessed had burned away the moment they touched her.

Light had erupted from him, a detonation that started behind his ribs and tore outward, flowing through his blood, fracturing the air around him. Ashrender was the blazing personification of his wrath, cutting and burning through flesh and sinew, hacking through bone. Sanguinagi weapons shattered against it—against him. And Cedric killed.

He killed and killed and killed.

He remembered little of the specific deaths. The way their faces lit up with fear as their bodies lit on fire. Hands that reached for him before being sliced clean off. Screams that were silenced mid-word. Raefe was there too, Cedric knew, fighting alongside him. But he didn’t remember much of that either, aside from the way the fae had hurled balls of flame at the doors the bastards were hiding behind.

What he did remember was the hollow in his chest where remorse should have been.

Where he might have considered whether the rush of cultists coming at them had been otherwise coerced into their servitude, like Ignatius and Tyrren. Where he might have seen that girl’s severed body lying in the middle of the hall as he ran by and felt pity or, at the very least, curiosity.

But Cedric didn’t care.

He couldn’t.

They had kept her from him. They had chained her, and they had suppressed her power, and they had hurt her—even one singular glimpse of her, bloodied and terrified, had told him that. And if the only way to reach her, to free her, was to burn a path through every last one of them, that was what Cedric would’ve done.

If there had been a thousand cultists in the castle, he would have cut down a thousand.

If there had been ten thousand, he would have found a way.

He did not feel bad about a single one.

No one would keep him from his solimaeus again.

“Is it like a soulmate?” he had asked Kit right after their group had set off for Nyrundelle, all those weeks ago.

“Pretty much,” she’d answered. “The direct translation would be closer to ‘light of my life.’ But the meaning is about right. Where did you hear that term?”

Cedric had only blinked at her before answering, “Elle.”

And Kit’s mismatched blue and green eyes had widened, but she’d simply nodded and said, “I see.”

With a contented sigh, Elyria shifted, rolling herself off Cedric’s chest, drawing his attention back. She was curled up on her side now, tucked against him, a gauzy blanket draped over her waist. The neckline of her sleeping dress had fallen down her shoulder, and with the long sheet of her hair pinned beneath her, the beautiful column of her neck was exposed.

Cedric’s gaze dropped to the mark he had left there, the faint crescent shape of their bond nearly iridescent in the cool light of the moon. Or was that just Cedric’s eyes playing tricks on him? The mark almost looked like it was shimmering, pulsing.

Like it was beckoning him, summoning him.

Mine.