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His clothes were ruffled—a silver-trimmed tunic and black pants—and he carried no weapons. He didn’t need them. Lucais radiated warmth, power, and light, and his features held onto absolutely no traces of heartbreak, disappointment, or resentment for what I had said to him and what I had done.

The High King of Faerie had already forgiven me—perhaps never thought I’d needed it to begin with—and, in that moment, something charged between us. Hot, intense, and familiar.

Thebond.

I could almost feel a tangible connection threading through the air between us.

I know you. I have known you always. I will know you forever. You and I are the same. We are one.

Lucais was not my prisoner.

He was not my High King.

He was my soulmate.

He was a safe place for me to land, to immerse myself in all of my wildest and most frantic dreams. He had a face that would never lay blame for his darkest emotions over me, hands that would never act them out on me, and a voice that would never be used against me. And even if fate had orchestrated it, did that make it any less real? Were we any less worthy if we listened to the stars? If I gave it—the stars, the High King, and even the damned Oracle—a chance?

My heart stuttered, beating to the sound of a thousand lives falling into each other across time and space, andsomething cracked open in my chest and bled light into the room between us.

Lucais saw the change. Wren probably saw it, too, but I wasn’t looking at him. I wasn’t looking at anything or anyone other than the dark-haired man in front of me who was offering me everything I had ever wanted in the depthless world of his eyes.

Something like sparks glittered in my peripheral, possibly coming from my fingertips. I flinched, barely—too consumed with the ache to remember the lives our souls had met in before. Lucais saw it happen, though, and he reacted more appropriately.

“Oh, fuck, Aura,” he muttered, practically leaping to step towards me. He clasped both of my hands in one of his and lifted the other to brush the hair back from my face.

I was consumed. I’d never had someone look at me the way Lucais looked at me—like I was his sole purpose in life, and the world simply ceased to exist from every other angle.

There was a beat of hesitation, and then he wrapped me in his strong embrace, covering me in the scent of smoke, heat, and sunlight. It was an unusual scent—unfamiliar but fulfilling, as though he truly was the piece of me that I had been missing all my life.

And so maybe that meant I could try.

At best, perhaps I would learn to love my soulmate. At the very least, I could do my best to keep him alive.

I didn’t owe him anything. He didn’t expect anything. But I had dreamed of him for months, and that had left me with something to offer him. After all, Lucais had waited for me his entire life, and I had done enough damage to enough people already.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whispered against his chest.

His hand came up to stroke my hair, fingers threading through it, tightening against my scalp in a possessive way. “Don’t you dare apologise. You never apologise.”

“I didn’t mean it. I take it back. I’ll…try.”

I heard his heart physically skip a beat, loud and alarming, and he squeezed me a little tighter. “Don’t run, Aura. You don’t have to run. Say the word, and we’ll take you wherever it is you need to go, no questions asked. You don’t have to hide from us. We would never—”

Maybe it was a delayed reaction to a near-death experience or a culmination of everything bad that had ever happened to me, but I suddenly felt as close to being in love as I ever had in my life.

And so, I pulled back, looked up at him, and kissed him.

Lucais started, as if my lips had electrified him, and his fingers flexed against my spine. He made a small, tortured sound, and pulled away, the colour in his eyes dancing, sparks flicking off a bonfire. “Aura, you don’t have to do that,” he whispered.

My heart was absolutely racing, sending my blood tearing through my veins like wildfire. “Let me try.”

Lucais nodded slowly and cupped my chin with his hand. Conflict was caught in his eyes, but it vanished in a blink. He tilted my head back towards his with excruciating slowness and parted his feather-soft lips as his mouth met mine again. Heat and light consumed me, fireworks streaking out of my nerves and burning me up from the inside out.

As my mouth opened for him, I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I couldn’t believe who I was doing it with or the things I quickly began wanting to do next. Lucais’s tongue brushed against mine, tasting sweet and smoky, and I sagged against him, his arm fastening around my waist to hold me up. He felt as hard as granite, every last inch of him. Arousal filledthe air, flowing out of me in waves, so strong that for once I could actually understand what Wren was talking about…

Wren.

I jumped back, cheeks aflame, and Lucais copied my movements.