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He reached for his shadows, but terror had already broken whatever fragile leash bound it. One razor-edged tendril lashed across her chest.
Silk parted.
Blue-tinged flesh flashed before him. A crimson line bloomed above her breast, warm blood spilling down the pale curve of her ribs.
Everything stopped as his shadows collapsed.
“Elarian.”
His voice barely existed.
She looked down at herself almost absently, fingertips brushing the blood welling through torn silk. When she raised them again, silvery crimson stained every line of her palm. Then she looked at him, and the heartbreak spilling from her eyes broke him faster than any horrors enacted by Aurelion’s hand. A slow, exhausted sadness settled across Elarian’s face as tears freely flowed over her trembling lips.
“So this is who you choose to be,” she murmured at last.
Lucan took one stumbling step toward her.
“I didn’t—”
“You did.”
She pressed trembling fingers over the wound, though whether to stop the bleeding or simply to ground herself, he could not tell. The cut was not deep—Vaelor’s dagger had done worse—but the hand that dealt the wound hurt more, and he knew it.
“I kept telling myself the monster was only something you wore.” Groaning, she pulled herself upright, legs unsteady beneath her. “But it seems I was wrong.”
Lucan felt his knees threaten to give way.
“Elarian, please,” he said, taking a timid step toward her. The hurt in her eyes only flared.
“Don’t call me that, shivaem,” she spat back. “Caring when it is convenient for you is not enough.”
“I can’t control them!” The words tore from his chest, the witchlights overhead chiming softly in reply. “I…I…I’m trying to protect you.”
Elarian laughed—a raw sound that scraped across his flesh, leaving behind only raw, bloody wounds.
“Are you? Because from where I stand, I only see a monster who buried the man that held me last night the moment you heard a whisper of Aurelion’s name.”
Lucan froze, unable to breathe, because she was right.
He had spent five centuries surviving. Hiding his pain, severing ties from anything dear in his life, doing anything to reduce Aurelion’s control over him until he deluded himself he was his own master once again. But the first moment someone truly found him…
…he had become exactly what Aurelion had made him.
An eternally damned creature incapable of love.
He should have killed her long ago. Gods, why didn’t he kill her the first time they met? Her blood called to him from the dark, but then she willingly extended her fire, and Lucan realized he desperately wanted to live again.
Lucan stood rooted to the fractured marble.
The wound across Elarian’s breast bled steadily now, silvery crimson soaking through the torn black silk in slow, deliberate rivulets. Each drop struck the floor with unbearable softness. He had heard battlefields louder than that. He had listened to kingdoms collapse beneath the screams of dying men. Yet nothing had ever sounded so catastrophic as the quiet rhythm of blood escaping the woman he had promised himself would never again suffer by his hand.
His hand.
Gods.
“Elarian…” He scarcely recognized his own voice.
She did not answer.
