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Holt stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, looking up to the stairs. “Let us go find her. If you can’t be seen, then you should stay here for the time being.” He didn’t hesitate to abandon me, fleeing up the stairs to the throne room and leaving me to pace back and forth in the dungeon. The bodies had piled up in my absence, and it took everything in me to focus and not return to my purpose.

They’d waited this long, and they would have to continue to wait. If a battle was truly coming, there would be more where they came from.

Death was inevitable in war.

I only hoped we could keep it as minimal as possible.

I dragged my hand over the stone, the feeling of the porous rock the only thing that grounded me in those few moments where Holt was gone. I wished I could follow after him, the urge to move and do something like an itch in my skin that I couldn’t scratch. It left me restless, my worry over Estrella making me need to do something productive with myself in her absence.

I needed to move.

The door to the dungeon opened as Holt guided Nila into the room, the smaller woman making her way down the stairs hurriedly. “Estrella?” she asked, taking in the sight of only me standing and waiting in the dungeon.

“She’ll be here soon, and she’s coming to fight. We need those who are willing to fight alongside her—”

My entire body jerked back, the pain in my chest like a physical blow as it morphed into more pain.

“Caldris…” Holt said, his stare locked onto the side of my neck. His eyes were wide, his mouth open as he floundered for words.

Cold spread through me, a cold the likes of which I’d never known. I tore at my shirt, shoving it down over my shoulder to watch as myviniculumfaded away, sinking into my skin and then disappearing from view entirely. Holt reached for the bottom of my sleeve, shoving up my forearm so that we could watch as it spread from my elbow and slowly made its way to my wrist. My arm had never been free from those marks, my skin looking too bare in their absence. Even before she’d been born, I’d had that part of my mate with me.

Instead now, there was only nothingness, a tingle on my skin where the sign of my love had once been, as if she’d never existed at all.

“No,” I muttered, touching my hand and trying to hold those marks on me. Trying to cling to the one last piece of her as the thread tied around my finger turned gray. It lost its vibrance, my world lost its color as I felt that thread snap.

It took my soul with it, my heart.

I screamed, feeling that loss so deep in me that I felt like half a person. Half a being. I touched my fingers to the frayed edge of our bond where it writhed in the wind, dead and useless.

“Caldris,” Holt said, patting my cheek to try to get my attention as I stared down at the remains of what had once been my everything.

Now there was just nothing. A dark world with no hope. Nothing to live for, and my only comfort was that my death was certain. I would follow after her, and we’d be reunited in the afterlife.

A place without pain. A place without loss. A place without this horrible, numb emptiness.

For now, all I knew was that my mate was gone.

Estrella was dead, and I’d have done anything to die faster, because every moment I spent without her was a moment too long. I’d waited centuries to find her.

Even death couldn’t keep me from her now.