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NORA

W e don’t speak on the climb back from the ruins.

The silence between us has changed, hollow and sharp, filled with too many truths we can’t take back. I feel them pressing in from all sides. His words still burn in my chest like cinders.

If they want you, it means they think you belong to them.

I keep my eyes on the path ahead, though the terrain shifts beneath my feet like it wants to swallow me whole. The Wastes never forget. I’m starting to think they don’t forgive, either.

By the time we return to the ridge, night has thickened into something almost tangible. Clouds blot out the moons, and the stars hang low, watching. The fire Rhaegar left behind has burned to coals, casting long, skeletal shadows across the rock.

Something tightens in my chest as I look at our camp.

Something is wrong.

Then I feel it, cold and sudden, like a hand down my spine.

They're here.

“Rhaegar…” I breathe, my voice brittle.

He turns before I finish the warning. His body tenses, wings flaring wide, catching the scent on the air.

Then they emerge.

From the dark. From the mist. From the land itself .

Three of them at first. Then five.

The same haunting figures that watched from the shadows. Only now, they move.

And they’re fast.

I scramble back as one closes in, metal-clad arms reaching. I raise my hand to cast, to defend, but the magic stalls—like it’s been seized mid-thought. A freezing pressure hits my skull, and I stagger, dropping to one knee.

“No,” I whisper. “No—get out?—”

One of them is suddenly there, kneeling in front of me. I don’t see his face, just the smooth, dark curve of his helm and the runes carved down his arm. His hand lifts.

I try to scream, but it doesn’t come in time.

He touches me.

The moment his fingers graze my skin, a shock tears through me like lightning cleaving bone. My vision whites out. My mind opens like a wound.

And they pour in.

A war.

Ash raining from a broken sky. Silver blades crashing against stone. Women screaming. Men howling. My name—no, not mine—echoing through the blood-slick halls of a forgotten fortress.

A betrayal.

Someone falling. A crown shattering. A voice, familiar but wrong, whispering, “You were promised to us.”

A promise made in blood.

Hands bound. Runes seared into flesh. A soul split in two.

And through it all, a name I do not know spoken like it belongs to me.

“Medea.”

My knees give out completely. The world reels. My thoughts unravel into threads, each one a memory I don’t recognize but can’t deny.

“No,” I gasp, dragging myself backward. “That’s not who I am?—”

The figure rises.

And I finally see his eyes.

Not empty sockets.

But mirrors.

He sees me. Knows me. Not Nora, but whoever I once was, buried beneath magic and time.

And he’s not here to kill me.

He’s here to claim me.

Rhaegar hits him like a meteor.

Stone crashes into steel. A scream—mine—cuts the air as the Wraithborn is torn from me and hurled across the clearing.

Rhaegar is vicious. Feral.

No sword. No hesitation.

Just claws and fury.

He doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t wait for them to explain.

He tears.

He rips.

One of them lunges, but Rhaegar’s wing slams him into the rock wall with a crack that echoes through the canyon. Another charges from the left, but he’s too slow. Rhaegar twists mid-air, his fist slamming into the creature’s helm hard enough to crumple it inward.

They don’t scream. Don’t cry out. They move like shadows given shape—fluid, relentless, unyielding.

But Rhaegar is worse.

His obsidian skin splits in places where light bleeds through, as if he’s coming undone to become more than he was. His magic roars through the bond, and it scorches me from within.

But he’s not fighting to protect me.

He’s fighting to keep me.

And that makes something dark and primal twist deep inside me.

When it’s done, when the last of them flees into the dark with a sound like cracking ice, Rhaegar turns back to me.

His chest rises and falls with uneven breaths. His left arm bleeds molten, hissing into the earth.

“You’re not safe anymore,” he growls.

I try to answer, but the voice inside me speaks first.

Medea.

I flinch.

He steps forward. I see the blood, mine, theirs, his, on his skin. I see the worry he’ll never admit darkening his gaze.

“They touched your mind,” he says, low and rough. “What did you see?”

“I…” My throat closes. “I don’t know. I saw… things. Names. Places I don’t recognize. But they felt… real.”

His jaw tenses. “They are.”

“But they aren’t my memories.”

He doesn’t answer.

Because maybe they are.

Maybe they were.

Maybe I am someone else.

“I’m not her,” I whisper, trying to make myself believe it.

“You’re not,” he says too quickly. “I won’t let it be. You’re mine, and not even them can take you.”