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CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

I cursed roughly as I panted on hand and knee in the heart of the ruined fortress which I’d torn from the edge of the Skyforgers’ precious island.

Something had ripped my Dragon from me and forced the shift but not before I’d completed my fall to the ground where my powerful body had protected me from the worst of the injuries I might have gained.

My head spun with the pain of the wound which marked my temple, blood dripping through strands of dark hair into my eyes and obscuring my vision.

Every heavy breath I dragged into my lungs was laced with masonry dust, the dry scent of it staining my bare skin and marking me so thoroughly I doubted I’d ever fully cleanse myself of it.

I was concealed within a piece of what I assumed had once been a wing of the fortress I’d destroyed, one wall and half of its roof still miraculously intact and shielding me from the battlefield beyond.

Everything had changed while I’d been trapped in that cavern and yet nothing had changed at all. This battle was just like so many others, the hatred which tainted The Waning Lands never ceasing.

Perhaps I should have been running already. But I had nowhere to run to.

Footsteps picked lightly across the crumbling stone which surrounded me and I lifted my head, the heavy weight of my injuries making my vision spin around the point of muted pink before my focus fell on her.

Her lips parted, some vicious plea burning in those grey eyes as we stared at one another without any words left between us.

Of course it was her. It had been her ever since she’d first stumbled upon me in that miserable cavern.

She stepped closer and I pushed myself back onto my haunches, kneeling before her as if I were her creature alone.

Her fingers brushed my jaw and a moment hung between us as that point of contact made my skin burn with far more potency than my Dragon fire had ever claimed.

She swallowed thickly and I placed my hand over hers, holding it against my skin.

“We can run,” I told her. “I know the old places, or we can find new ones. This war isn’t all there is.”

Pain burned in her grey eyes and my heart stilled as a tear slipped free of her hold, her fingers shifting against my jaw until something sharp pressed to my neck.

“Perhaps it’s not,” she said and there was genuine want in her words, a heartache so plain I knew she wanted to take me up on that offer, to turn and run from here with me into the unknown, to abandon all of this for the promise of something more.

But that pain which haunted her burned brighter than any wants of her own heart and as she set her jaw, I knew she wasn’t coming with me.

More words stuck in my throat, the ache in my chest a visceral thing, the pulse in my ears pounding so violently that it was all I could do to keep my eyes on her as this divide formed between us, a chasm so deep neither of us could cross it.

But still her hand was on my skin, the heat of her touch driving into me, making me regret every word I never spoke to her, making me want to take every moment back and replay them again because I hadn’t realised we’d been stealing them all along.

I was a Dragon and my kind hoarded treasure so of course I’d been capturing each memory with her and savouring it for the precious gift it had been.

She was sharp and bitter, broken and hurting but she was real .

The first real thing I’d held close in longer than I could remember and I’d never even told her that.

I should have asked her to run with me before this moment had crept up on us. I should have bound her in chains and dragged her from this place and these people and forced her to open her eyes to everything else the world might have been able to offer her.

But we’d both been too caught up in the ghosts of our past to see through them, to think clearly in our fleeting freedom. And now here we were, precisely where we’d both known we’d been heading and yet somehow I hadn’t really seen it coming.

There were no words I could offer her which would soften the hardness in her eyes.

She was what they’d told her to become so often that I doubted she could even see the truth of it.

A soldier, hardened in war and all else.

I’d asked her to run with me and despite the want which had flared in her gaze at those words, I could see all too clearly that they’d come too late and they weren’t nearly enough to corrupt her.

Something splintered in my chest as I took in that choice, her rejection stinging even more sharply than the bite of pain from the green gemstone as she drove it into my skin.

I lurched back in horror, a Dragon’s roar escaping me as I fought to shift but it was already too late for that.

I grabbed at the stone which she’d driven into my flesh but her magic encased me, forcing my arms away again while I fought and bellowed, her betrayal making the fear of my captivity so much more forceful.

I couldn’t go back to the dark. I couldn’t keep on existing while failing to live. I couldn’t return to that hell and ever hope to emerge with the truth of me intact again.

She’d done this. She’d promised me that I could run and yet here she was, thrusting me back into the hell which had already destroyed me once.

Something inside me splintered as I fought against the enormous weight of her power, my own magic churning violently, making the ground quake and the remains of Echo Fort crumble above us.

Vesper gritted her jaw, raising a hand to shield us from the falling masonry and as the world fell apart around us, I found myself fracturing too.

Another roar parted my lips, this one bound in pain and betrayal, this act too heinous to endure, this fate too cruel to claim me twice.

I begged the stars to end it, for Taurus to strike me down or Capricorn to cleave me from this endless existence which held nothing but pain and grief but they ignored my calls as always.

The stars had forsaken me as thoroughly as she had.

I thrashed as she bound me more tightly, her tears doing nothing to dispel the vitriol which burned through my veins as I looked at her, the hatred which coiled more tightly than a noose around my neck.

Perhaps I’d never had a choice in this but she had. She’d made her decision and mine was the head her axe fell upon. My saviour, my sanctuary, my demise.

“Your death is mine!” I reminded her in a raged yell which made the crumbling ruins that surrounded us quake.

“It’s mine , Vesper, and when I come to claim it from you, you will remember this day because I will carve every piece of this betrayal into your body and make you watch while I burn it from your bones. ”

My words lashed against her and I could feel them ripping pieces from her soul like flesh from her bones but even the tears which parted the soot and gore on her cheeks didn’t rattle the iron in her eyes.

“My fate is coming for me, Bastian,” she said roughly, her magic encasing me entirely and binding me to the destiny I feared more than any other, the fact that it came at her hands only making the pain of it worse. “And no man will ever turn me from it again.”