Chapter 129
*Jiselle*
I couldn’t tell where I ended and she began anymore.
My thoughts didn’t feel like mine–not entirely. They echoed through my head like distant voices in a room I no longer controlled. My memories unraveled as I tried to reach for them, slippery and unsteady, like wet ink bleeding across parchment. Whenever I grasped one, Eira’s voice would slip in, curling through it like smoke, tainting it with doubt.
I walked forward, though the space around me felt less like a corridor and more like a hallway carved from fractured time. Shadows pressed in from every side, forming walls that shimmered and breathed. Scenes rose up around me–some familiar, some wrong–but all of them mine. Or they used to be.
But they’d changed.
Everything was too quiet, like someone had pressed their hand over the mouth of the past. Too sharp, as if the edges of each memory could cut if I looked too closely. Too
wrong.
The first memory pulsed forward like a heartbeat, humming faintly with soft gold light. I recognized it before it fully formed.
I was seven.
Ethan and I ran barefoot through the woods behind our house, mud streaked up our legs, our hands sticky with stolen berries. I remembered the way sunlight poured through the trees like honey, how he laughed when I slipped on a mossy stone and fell
into the stream.
But here he didn’t laugh.
He shouted.
“Get up!” he snapped, his voice harsh, brittle. “Stop crying. You’re weak!”
And then he pushed me.
I stumbled backward, arms flailing, crashing into the shallow water as cold shocked my skin. I gasped and choked on the memory.
“No,” I said, my voice cracking. “That’s not what happened.”
But the scene continued anyway, as if I hadn’t spoken. As if this version of the past no longer needed my permission.
I backed away, heart racing, throat Successfully unlocked!
The walls rippled, warped, then shifted.
177
Chapter 128
A new memory climbed into place–this one heavier.
The arena.
I knew this place in my bones. The stone floor stained with blood and dust, the scent of sweat, steel, and adrenaline thick in the air. It was the day of my Trial. The moment I‘ d stood before my first opponent, heartbeat thrumming like a war drum in my chest. I‘ d stood tall. Strong. I remembered that. I knew that.
But here, I didn’t stand.
I knelt.
Hands bound at the wrists. Head bowed. My wolf silent.
Kael stood over me, his presence dark and suffocating. He didn’t need chains. His voice did the binding.
“You were always meant for more,” he whispered, leaning close. “You just needed someone to shape you.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it happened.”
But even as I said it, doubt splintered through me.
“You begged,” came Eira’s voice–soft, slick, seeping in from everywhere and nowhere.” Don’t you remember?”
I turned sharply, searching the edges of the memory, but she wasn’t there. Just empty air. Just my own ragged breathing.
“No,” I snapped. “I didn’t. I stood my ground.”
Her voice wrapped tighter around my spine. “You wanted to belong. You still do. That’s why it’s so easy to wear me.”
I stumbled away from the scene. It dissolved around me, flaking into ash.
But the next memory rose without hesitation.
This one I knew I wasn’t ready for.
Maximus.
The mark.
I tried to turn away. Tried to will it into something else. But my feet stayed rooted, as if
the ground beneath me had decided I needed to see it again.
I begged the memory to shift. Begged it to turn to smoke like the others.
But it didn’t.
And suddenly, I was there again.
Pushed to the ground. Pinned.
2/7
Chapter 128
His hand on my arm, then my throat, then over my markless skin.
The scent of his magic flooded my nose, too sharp, too bitter. My body froze–not in fear, but in rejection. My wolf clawed to the surface, screaming for escape, for breath, for space that never came.
And when the mark seared into me, it wasn’t with love.
It wasn’t with anything close to tenderness.
It was desperation. Control. Brutality disguised as fate.
My wolf screamed.
And this time, I didn’t just feel it.
I heard it.
A sound so primal it rattled through the bones of the memory. A sound that didn’t come from me, but from something older–wounded, sacred, enraged.
Eira’s voice surfaced again, quieter now. Not mocking.
Reverent.
“This is the moment,” she said. “This is where we became the same.”
It wasn’t just pain anymore.
It was rage.
Not mine–hers.
The kind of rage that simmered in the marrow, deep and ancient, unspoken for too long. It burned through me like a second pulse, demanding something louder than tears or silence.
For the first time, I saw that moment–the moment–through Eira’s eyes.
How small I looked. How vulnerable. How easily he had taken something I hadn’t been ready to give.
Not love. Not choice. Power.
That was the fracture. The exact place she found her way in.
“Burn him,” she whispered.
The words coiled through my mind like smoke. Thick. Seductive. I felt her fury like it belonged to me. Maybe it did.
“You had the right,” she said again.
“No.”
My voice cracked, but it didn’t carry conviction.
“He took,” she pressed. “He branded. And they let him stay.”
377
Chapter 128
The floor beneath me trembled, then cracked. Hairline fractures streaked outward beneath my feet like veins of fire. My hands surged with heat, light flashing down to my fingertips. I didn’t need to look to know what it meant.
My power was responding to her pain.
To our pain.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the world down to ash. I wanted-
I wanted justice.
But just before the fire could reach the surface, another memory bled into the space around me.
The room shifted.
The flames hissed down.
And then I saw him.
Ethan.
Crawling.
His body broken. Hands bloodied. Face pale and bruised. He dragged himself through mud and shattered stone, calling out for me.
“Jiselle-”
His voice cracked like a blade of ice through a windowpane.
And then our eyes met.
Not past me. Not a memory version. Me.
And in them, I saw it-
Fear.
Not of death.
Of me.
It broke something I didn’t know was still whole.
My knees gave way, and I collapsed where I stood, the fire sputtering out across my skin. The world around me–illusion, memory, projection–all of it cracked.
Because that memory? That one wasn’t twisted.
That moment was mine.
Not hers. Not rewritten.
Real.
And it shattered me.
4/7
Chapter 128
Because in that moment, I had nearly killed my brother.
And I would have, if I’d let her have just one second more.
A sob ripped from my chest, full and hoarse. I curled forward, gripping my ribs like I could claw her out with my bare hands.
But she didn’t scream this time. She didn’t demand or tempt or rage.
She whispered.
Soft.
Patient.
“Even now, you’re mine.”
“No,” I gasped, shaking my head..
“You already chose me.”
“No.”
The word trembled from my mouth, not a rejection, but a plea.
Then–light.
Soft at first. Gentle.
A step on stone.
And I lifted my head.
She stood in front of me.
Not Eira.
Not the ghost. Not the flame.
Me.
The girl I used to be. Before the Trials. Before the prophecy. Before fire ever touched my skin.
Barefoot.
Hair loose and tangled,
Eyes wide with hope and fear wrapped together like old thread.
She knelt in front of me, her hands empty, her face open.
And she whispered-
not desperate, not demanding,
just steady.
“You can still choose.”
5/7
