Chapter 135
Chapter 135
“Nathaniel‘
The weight of what we weren’t saying pressed thicker than the early morning mist.
Max stood across from me just beyond the camp’s outer ring, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, shoulders squared but tense–too still for someone pretending to be calm. The trees around us swayed with the wind, but he didn’t move. Neither did I.
We hadn’t said a word yet.
But the silence was a language we both spoke fluently.
I didn’t ask him to follow me out here. He’d sensed it–the pull in the air, the subtle shift when something needed to be dealt with outside the sight of others. We always knew when we were heading toward a fight. Even now, with everything burning down around us and Jiselle barely stitched back together, we were the same two wolves circling the same old wound.
Only this time, it was worse.
Because this time, it wasn’t just pride or territory between us,
It was her.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Max said first, voice quiet but edged like a blade dulled by too many hits. “And I’m not interested in doing this.”
“You’re going to,” I said. “Because I am.”
His jaw twitched. “That so?”
“You stood over her when she couldn’t defend herself,” I said. “You burned a mark into her skin because you couldn’t stand the idea of someone else getting there first.”
His eyes darkened. “Don’t start-”
“You’re right,” I cut in. “We’ve already started. The day you broke the bond she didn’t ask for, and I let her carry the one we were both too scared to speak
aloud. That’s where it started.”
Max turned his head slightly, but he didn’t look away. “You think you’ve always been the better man, don’t you?”
“I think I never tried to own her.”
He flinched at that–barely–but enough.
“She’s different now,” I said. “Changed. And we’re all walking around pretending we know how to handle it.”
“Do you?”
“No.” I exhaled. “But I’m trying. I’m here.”
Max’s voice dropped. “So am I.”
I stepped forward, just enough to close the distance that made honesty too easy to dodge.
“Do you still love her?”
The question landed between us like thunder–quiet, but impossible to ignore.
Max didn’t look at me. For a second, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
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Then, quietly, like it wasn’t for me at all: “Yeah.”
It wasn’t defiant. It wasn’t even apologetic. It just was.
“But it doesn’t matter anymore,” he added. “Because she’s not just Jiselle.”
“She’s still her.”
“She’s also something else.” He finally looked at me again. “And if you can’t hold her together, Morningstar… I will.”
We didn’t move. We didn’t speak. But everything between us snapped taut like it always did–rivalry wound around memory, guilt twisted into protection, love warped into something sharper.
The ground beneath us pulsed.
We both felt it.
Max’s eyes flicked toward the camp. “That’s her.”
I turned before he could say more, running fast enough to split wind. The trees blurred. Magic tingled along my spine like the air itself was warning me. When I broke through the clearing, I saw it instantly.
Jiselle stood at the center of the field, barefoot, her eyes wide with confusion. Flame coiled up her arms–violet, not gold–rising in steady waves, not out of aggression, but instability. Like something had slipped loose while she slept, and now it was rising.
Eva knelt nearby, hands splayed against the earth, trying to anchor the surge.
Ethan was at Jiselle’s side, his hands out, not touching her but close enough to catch her if she dropped.
She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t speaking. But her magic–gods, her magic was calling.
Not outward like an explosion. Not inward like collapse.
Calling.
A low, pulsing hum that vibrated not through the air, but through everything. Through the soil, the light, the very breath of the world. It wasn’t rage. It
wasn’t fear. It was summoning.
But summoning what–I didn’t know.
Not until I felt it.
The bond.
It didn’t thrum like it had before–didn’t simply tug at my ribs or ache behind my sternum like an old wound reopened.
It reached.
Toward me.
Through me.
A pull that wasn’t physical, but intimate, and ancient in a way I couldn’t define. I staggered where I stood, knees bending slightly under the pr from pain, but from sheer weight. It was like standing in the heart of a storm that hadn’t broken yet, every molecule vibrating with something me, than her, than anything we’d touched before.
The tether that once tied us soul–to–soul–a bond we’d both ignored, scarred, and buried–was moving.
not
than
I felt it drag along my spine like a line of fire. It threaded through my ribs, curled against the base of my skull, and coiled at the edge of something deeper
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Chapter 135
-memory, instinct, legacy.
“She’s not doing this,” Ethan shouted across the field, bracing Jiselle’s arm as she wavered on her feet. “It’s pulling from somewhere—feeding too much,”
“She’s feeding off the bond,” Eva called back, panic slipping into her voice.
“No,” I said, stepping forward, my voice firmer than I felt. “The bond’s feeding into her.”
And it was.
Not just emotion. Not just memory.
Power.
Magic. Raw and unfiltered, flowing into her through a connection that shouldn’t still exist.
But it did.
And now, it was changing.
The bond wasn’t static anymore. It wasn’t simply a tether of love or grief. It was a channel. A living conduit linking us not just by fate–but by function. The leyline that had woven through her now wove through me, and the energy that tried to settle in her skin bled through mine like heat through metal.
My bones ached with it. My breath caught. My pulse slowed.
This wasn’t resonance.
This was becoming.
“Jiselle “I called her name, more to anchor myself than to summon her.
She turned.
Slowly.
Not dazed. Not broken. Just… aware.
Her gaze locked with mine, and in it, I didn’t see fear.
I didn’t see the girl I’d left too many times.
I saw a force. A center.
Herself.
She opened her mouth like she wanted to speak–but then her entire body arched with another wave. The flame surged, not as a flare but as a pulse of violet energy that rippled outward from her core, lifting dust from the earth and bending the branches of nearby trees.
I lunged forward just as her knees buckled.
She didn’t fall hard. I caught her before gravity could make a spectacle of it, before her body could hit the ground. She was half–limp, not unconscious, but weightless in a way that terrified me.
Her breath was shallow. Labored.
But not panicked.
And the glow–it was still there, coiling beneath her skin like a second soul, like the storm inside her had gone quiet only because it had found a place to
live.
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Chapter 135
I held her close, pressing my forehead to hers, feeling the damp heat of her skin and the slow, deliberate rise and fall of her chest,
“It’s okay,” I whispered, letting the words settle between us. “You’re safe.”
But even as I said it, the bond inside me shifted again.
Not from strain.
From evolution.
I saw it not with my eyes, but with something older. Something beyond physical sight. Like instinct written in the language of magic.
The scar that once marked our severance–the line that had been marred by years of silence and pain–wasn’t healing.
It was rewriting.
I felt it stretch between us, not as a wound, but as a braid.
My breath caught.
My heartbeat slowed.
And then synced.
With hers.
I felt her inhale before I did. Felt her magic before she moved. The bond wasn’t just humming in the background anymore. It was active.
Alive.
An extension of her… and now, of me.
And I knew.
With a certainty that didn’t need prophecy or proof.
The bond wasn’t just scarred.
It was becoming something else.
