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But I was fast too.

I caught her legs, twisting brutally. She crashed into the ground and I came down on her a second later.

“Unless you’d rather admit defeat?”

One second, she was pressed against me, caught between my arm and my body, the blade of my axe pressed to her side. No escape.

The next, she was gone.

My beast threw back his head to roar—

“I want my reward.”

Two blades pressed into the back of my neck. One swift, punishing movement, and they would cross each other—and remove my head from my body.

I dropped my axe. “You did it.”

The blades on my neck dropped away. I swiped up my axe, spinning as Veyka retreated a few steps.

She stared down at her hands—still clutching her knives—at her arms and then down at her own feet. As if she couldn’t quite believe that her entire body was there.

“I did it.” Half sigh, half sob. “I held onto the tether—to you. I went into the void, just enough, then I came back out. Here. In this realm—in this Ancestors-damned clearing.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

My own eyes burned.

Relief. That’s what this feeling was.

She would master her power. It might take another month, another year. But the void would not steal my mate from me. She was born to command it.

56

VEYKA

I was unleashed.

Maybe it was seeing the humans, their unbridled joy in the face of such danger and death. Or maybe it was Arthur—the rage I felt propelling me once again. Once it had been rage at his murder. Now it was rage at him—for all the things he hadn’t told me. All the actions he’d taken for my protection without a whisper to me.

The questions he’d left behind.

Or maybe I just really wanted to wipe that smug, self-satisfied smirk off of Arran’s annoyingly handsome face.

Moving between physical locations in the realm I was already in was infinitely easier. After the first few times, I hardly felt it at all. The less distance I went, the less tingling there was. But even when I disappeared from one side of the clearing to the other, I was only in the void for a moment.

I could still feel the other realms. They were hovering there on the outside of my awareness. Like layers of paper in a book. But instead of ripping a hole in the ones above or below, I moved along the same line of text.

It was easier. It was less terrifying.

And it made that ember of magic inside of me very happy. It was glowing. I was glowing. Or at least, I felt like I was.

Arran reached for me.

I summoned the void and reappeared behind him.

His beast growled. I spied a tree over his left shoulder. A blink, and I was behind it.

I couldn’t hear his beast when I was in the void. But I could still feel the mating bond in my chest—the tether. I knew my mate was close, that I was hovering near him, near the realm he occupied.

Maybe that was why it was easier—because I could feel Arran there with me.