Page 185 of Dark Souls

We huddled around the computer screen as my heart beat out of sync. Sienna clicked play on the black screen and a wobbly image of cave walls appeared before shifting to a brown-haired man. His red eyes blazed with desperate hunger and his gaunt cheeks made him look almost skeletal. He seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t work out how I knew him.

“Um, so what? I just talk?” he said, peering past the camera at whoever held the choker up to record this. The person obviously gave him confirmation, and he exhaled, pushing his dirty hair away from his face. “Okay. Um, Hi!” He gave a little wave. “My name is Hayes Cohen. I’m a–”

My grandpapi shoved himself forward and pressed pause on the video, staring at the man’s face with shock. “Hayes Cohen!”

“You know him?” I asked, glancing between Grandpapi and the computer screen.

“He’s one of our men. A young Romano soldier who lived in the village outside the castle walls. Nice kid. We thought he was dead,” Grandpapi said, standing straight and placing one hand on his hip and the other at the nape of his neck. The shock was rolling off his tense shoulders. “Four years ago, he supposedly was sent on a mission to chase off a rogue wolf that was stalking the border but he never came back. We never found his body. His parents were devastated.”

“Well, that was clearly bullshit. Who told you that?” Raiden asked.

“Mitchell,” I hissed as my fangs snapped down with rage. Grandpapi looked just as pissed. He pressed play again, folding his arms across his chest as his nostrils flared.

Hayes continued to talk. “I’m a Romano soldier, and I was attacked and captured years ago. I’ve been kept down here in a cave to starve ever since. The people responsible are Mitchell and Parisa Morton.” He sighed, his eyes flicking back to whoever was with him before he licked his dry lips and prepared himself for his next words. Whatever they were, they were difficult to say. “I did nothing wrong other than fall in love with their daughter. Lia Morton is my soulmate. But I am not good enough for her.”

“You are,” a gruff voice that lives deep within the safety of my heart said from behind the camera.

“Luka! That was Luka’s voice!” I slammed my hands over my mouth as tears sprang to my eyes at the overwhelming relief hearing his voice caused me.

Hayes smiled bashfully. “I am. I may not be a prince or a member of society’s most influential and powerful elites. But I am a decent man. I like to think I am kind, respectful, loyal, apparently a little funny, and I know I would make a good mate. I know I would have loved her fearlessly and always protected her. I know I would have spent every day trying to make her happy, not with money or power, but with affection and love. I know if I was given the chance, I would have given her a fulfilled life where she would never question how loved she was. But those things aren’t important to her parents. In their eyes, their daughter doesn’t get to decide whether those things are important to her either. They took that choice away from her.” He turned his head away to look up at the ceiling of the cave before he stared back at the camera. “I might die down here. Actually, I will most probably die here. But if, by some miracle, Lia ever sees this, I don’t want her to feel guilty. I don’t want her to blame herself. But I do want her to know the truth. All I want her to know is that I died for love. Because if I had the choice to go back to that day and never speak to her or see the beauty of her smile just so I could live, I’d refuse.”

The camera turned and Luka’s devilishly handsome face appeared. His scarlet eyes flared a captivating dance of fire and darkness and his crimson hair was damp, falling forward into his eyes. I inhaled a sharp, painful breath at the beauty of him.

“I have no idea who will find this or if it will be too late by the time anyone watches it but…” He huffed, turning his head to look at the raven that was sitting next to him on a boulder. “I may have someone looking out for me in this life, after all.” He faced the camera again. “In fact, I know I do. More than one. I’ve always believed I was alone in this. That I could never trust anyone enough to help me, but that changed the moment you entered my life. Ilaria, I can’t tell you where I am or how much longer I have to live because those are things I don’t know. I can’t tell you what I did to deserve to have you as mine. I can’t tell you why it’s taken me this long to say the words that I have known since the moment I saw you. But I can tell you that I love you. You are nothing short of everything to me.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I stared into his eyes. He didn’t need his humanity to love me. Our love was stronger than any barrier, any magic or any obstacle.

“Damn, yours was better than mine,” Hayes groaned in the background, causing an amused expression to appear on Luka’s face. It wasn’t quite a smile but close enough. My heart hurt. He glanced at the camera again.

“Don’t let me die with this fool, love. I want to die an ancient man with you in my arms.” Luka spun the camera around the cave and then up to the ceiling where the moon and stars above peeked through the opening high above. “Find us. I know you can figure it out, Snow. You always find a way.”

I gasped, slamming my hand over my mouth as the camera moved erratically while the raven flew out of the cave with my choker in its beak. My grandpapi leaned forward, studying the cliffs and green stretches of land below as the raven flew against the winds.

“He called me Snow,” I whispered, unable to believe I actually heard that name from his lips.

“And that’s important because?” Raiden asked, with obvious confusion on his face.

“Only Heathen calls me Snow. It’s what he’s always called me. But Luka could never have known that.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence.” Raiden shrugged, but I shook my head, my mind racing as I started pacing the floor and trying to digest everything in that video. Lia had a soulmate. One that her parents had captured to keep them apart. Did she know? And Luka… my heart swelled at his confession of love. But to call me Snow? That couldn’t be a coincidence. Maybe… just maybe… subconsciously, Heathen was pushing through? The spell was weakening. What caused another fracture? Was it because he finally admitted out loud that he loved me? The first one was after I fully bonded with Luka. I could see his memories. The second, after I mated with Heathen, Luka could speak about his past. A confession of love and Heathen is pushing through?

“Did this camera have a tracking device?” my grandpapi was asking Sienna as my attention returned to the room, my epiphany at the forefront of my mind.

“Yes, but only for the choker’s current location.” She pointed down at it lying on the desk. “But it looks like the camera feed recorded the entire journey the raven took from the cave to the castle. So we can map it out.”

My grandpapi nodded, twisting his wrist and causing a huge map to appear on the table. “Fast forward the footage to the castle and we will track its journey backwards. We can also work out roughly how far away it is by how long it took the raven to reach us. Anyone know what speed a raven can fly?”

Raiden pulled out his phone, searching the internet. “Twenty to thirty mph, but some can reach up to fifty in sustained flight.”

“Sienna? Can you send that footage to Leif’s phone? I don’t need it all, just the first bit with Hayes,” I said, shoving Leif’s phone under her nose.

“Sure. What are you planning?” She started to cut and copy some of the video before sending it.

“Lia deserves to know who her parents really are. And I think I know how to break the spell,” I replied, feeling a strange calmness settling over me. “What was one thing, despite their darkness, that was Celeste and Cora’s weakness?”

They all stared at me with vacant expressions on their faces.

“Pure love,” I answered for them.