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“N O!” I reached for his hands to drag them off the altar, but an invisible barrier prevented me from crossing the line of the central symbol. “Don’t do this!” Frantic, I spun within the circle of his arms.

But it was already too late.

The altar accepted his offering with brutal efficiency. Starlight erupted from his skin, not just surrounding him but pouring from him. His eyes locked with mine as his form began to dissolve into thousands of twinkling points of light, like a constellation coming undone.

“Tell Ren I’m sorry,” he said, his voice a whisper in my mind.

And then he was gone, his essence absorbed into the ritual.

I spun back to the altar, and watched it blaze with combined moonlight and starlight, with Reiji’s life force, the power building to a blinding crescendo that made the very foundations of the Sun Keep tremble.

I clutched my chest and fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. Our bond—new and barely formed—snapped with an audible sound, the emptiness it left behind a hollow ache after such a brief connection, an echo of what might have been.

The many-voice spoke again, but now it seemed to come from within me as well, resonating in my very marrow.

“The sacrifice is accepted,” it intoned, using my lips and my tongue and my teeth to form the sounds. “The curse shall be broken.”

The words echoed through the chamber, through my mind, through my soul.

And in their wake came a silence so profound, it felt like the universe itself had paused to witness what would follow.

The many-voice spoke again, this time repeating the words directly inside my head, a secret whispered between ancient souls.

“The sacrifice is accepted. The curse shall be broken.”

Something inside me cracked open. Not pain, exactly, but the feeling of a wall inside my being splitting apart—a wall I’d never known existed until the moment it began to crumble. My vision went silver white as moonlight erupted from my skin, not streaming outward as it had before, but inward, illuminating something hidden in the deepest, darkest corners of my soul.

I was no longer in the ritual chamber.

I stood on the edge of a cliff, a cosmic precipice, stars scattered below me like a sea of spilled diamonds. My body felt both impossibly vast and achingly mortal, stretched between two realities. Before me hovered a woman—no, not a woman—a being of pure luminescence with features that mirrored my own, yet weren’t quite mine. Her bottomless eyes held the wisdom of eons, her skin translucent as moonlight across water.

She reached for me, her palm against mine, our fingers perfectly aligned. Where we touched, the boundaries between us blurred.

“I’ve waited so long,” she whispered, her voice the rustle of night winds and the silence between heartbeats. “You’ve carried me without knowing, from the moment of your creation.”

“Who are you?” I asked, though I already knew the answer, had always known it somehow, like a forgotten word clinging to the tip of my tongue suddenly remembered.

“I am Selene,” she said, her form beginning to dissolve into motes of silver light that streamed toward me. “And I am you. We were separated, bound apart for protection. As the shifters’ curse breaks beyond these walls, so too does the veil that has kept us from knowing each other.”

The particles of her being sank into my skin, not painful but profound, like puzzle pieces locking into place, like coming home after a lifetime of wandering. Memories that weren’t mine yet belonged to me flooded through my consciousness—the birth of stars, humans turning their faces toward the night sky in worship, the first vampires fighting the shadow.

A deep, boundless love shared between three beings harnessing the power of the moon, the sun, and the stars. Selene, Helios, and Eos—lovers eternal.

“Remember,” her voice echoed, now coming from within my own chest as the last of her form merged with mine. “The truth lives within you. Remember. Two bindings fall this night—one ancient, one older still.”

The vision collapsed, and I found myself back in the ritual chamber, on my knees before the altar. But I was not the same. The revelation didn’t strike me like lightning; it bloomed within me like a flower that had always been there, waiting for the right moment to unfurl its petals.

I wasn’t just connected to Selene through the ancient bloodline of vampire queens. I was Selene incarnate, the goddess reborn in mortal form, separated from my true nature by an enchantment as old as the shifters’ curse itself.

The understanding settled into my bones with quiet certainty. This wasn’t new information. It was recognition, remembrance of what had always been true. My ability to channel divine power without a full harem, my connection to spirits, the way my will could overpower even Veris, the shifter king—these weren’t gifts bestowed upon me by the goddess; they were expressions of my true nature, fragments of a goddess finding her way back to herself through the vessel of my mortal body.

The last of Reiji’s starlight surged upward, carrying the binding magic of the curse with it. The manganese veins in the walls pulsed once, twice, then flared with bright, pure golden light as the shadow corruption was exposed to the surface.

A shock wave of power exploded outward, knocking everyone in the chamber off their feet. I sensed the curse breaking fully, its ancient bonds within the shifters shattering as Reiji’s sacrifice tore them apart. The air itself seemed to sigh in relief, not just for the shifters, but for me, as the last of my own binding fell away.

And then, silence.

The chamber fell eerily still, the only movement the rising wisps of smoke from the extinguished candles.

I remained on my knees, too drained to stand. The revelation of my true nature echoed through my mind, too enormous to process in the wake of Reiji’s death.

A low groan from across the chamber broke through my daze. Veris was rising from the floor, my will’s hold on him one more thing shattered by the ritual. His amber eyes blazed with fury as he took in the scene—the glowing altar, the empty space where Reiji had stood, the manganese veins now pulsing with healthy golden light instead of shadow corruption.

“What have you done?” he snarled, his voice rough with rage.

I struggled to my feet, using the altar for support, silver light flickering weakly around me. The ritual had drained nearly everything I had, leaving me hollow and spent. “Exactly what I promised,” I managed. “I broke your curse.”

His composure shattered completely, and for the first time, I glimpsed what lurked behind his eyes—a darkness that had nothing to do with shifter magic and everything to do with the ancient and malevolent being pulling his strings.

“You’ve ruined everything!” Veris roared.

He lunged toward me, but Gavin intercepted him, moving with preternatural speed despite his weakened state. They collided with bone-crushing force, the impact echoing through the chamber.

The shifter commanders sprang into action, surrounding Gavin in seconds. He fought them off with desperate ferocity, his silver eyes wild. Even in his depleted state, he was magnificent, all coiled muscle and deadly precision, buying me precious seconds I couldn’t use.

“Sophie, run!” he shouted, wrestling with two commanders at once.

But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t take a single step away from the altar, the only thing keeping me upright. The ritual had taken too much. My legs gave out, and I collapsed to my knees again, my power a mere flicker where it had once been an inferno. Through my bond with Gavin, I felt his desperate strength, his determination to protect me at all costs, even with the odds stacked impossibly against him.

“Please,” I whispered, the word falling useless in the chaos, a plea to deities who had already shown their hand. I was one of them, and yet I couldn’t even save myself.

A commander caught Gavin with a blow to the temple that would have killed a mortal man. He staggered, blood streaming from the wound, but continued fighting. For each shifter he dispatched, two more took their place, an endless wave of bodies overwhelming him through sheer numbers.

“Enough,” Veris barked, his voice cutting through the commotion. “Take him to the portal. Throw him through. Somewhere remote.” A slow, wicked grin spread across his face. “Atlantis. The queens, too.”

“NO!” The scream tore from my throat, raw and primal. Atlantis—the sunken city where Veris sent his enemies. Where he’d exiled Bastian’s mom, effectively executing her. It was a death sentence for the queens, possibly one for Gavin as well in his weakened state. I tried to crawl toward Gavin, dragging myself across cold stone, fingers bloody from the effort. My connection to him pulsed with his fury, his fear—not for himself, but for me.

Eight shifters finally overpowered him, forcing him to the ground with brutal efficiency. His silver eyes found mine across the chamber, luminous with a promise that transcended our circumstances.

“Sophie,” he called, blood trickling down his face, his voice steady despite everything. “I will return to you.” The same vow he’d made when he chose to stay behind during our first rescue mission. The same words that had sustained me through our separation.

I reached for him, my fingers curling around empty air as they dragged him away. Our bond stretched like a silver cord between us, straining but unbroken.

As they pulled him through the doorway, his struggles intensified, desperation replacing calculated resistance. The last glimpse I had of him was his face, twisted with anguish, not for the pain they inflicted nor for the inevitable fate of the queens who would accompany him through the portal to their underwater graves, but for leaving me behind.