Page 20 of V for Vilified (Hunter V #4)

Pieces of My Soul

Jo

A magical bond wasn’t complicated. It only required one item to act as a binding host in the interim, while our magic was weaving together to form the connection.

I never thought I’d be open to anything like this after Reyna. A relationship, maybe, but not a bond. Only, the appeal of locking out chaos magic from both of us was too tempting. I’d seen what it’d done to others, what it’d done to me. It was much harder to deny the urge once we’d gotten a taste.

Chaos magic was what started all of this. The reason I lost Reyna. The reason I lost my mother, long before the Nether Royals killed her and sent the rest of us into hiding. The reason our realm feared our kind and set out to burn every single one of us at the stake.

Despite chaos magic being avoidable, it was suggested that once we had a taste, we couldn’t be recovered. Absolute bullshit, but it was the entire reason we were nearly hunted out of existence.

The thing was, the prissy bitch was right to be afraid of it affecting V.

Chaos magic was dangerous, especially for someone as young and new to magic as her.

It consumed the ones who relied on it. It’d be easier to keep her away from it entirely rather than deal with it after she’d already gotten a taste.

When Reyna and I defected to the human realm, it was with the promise to never use it again, not even when our lives were at risk.

Thankfully, my shadow magic didn’t rely on chaos to work, but everything else I was taught did.

I had to relearn how to fight and use magic, and that inexperience led to Reyna’s capture, and ultimately, her death.

I wasn’t strong enough to save us both. The humans weren’t powerless like my kind made them out to be. Hunters were uncomfortably lethal even around that time. They knew things about us they shouldn’t.

Humans had been experimenting well before Reyna and I came to that realm.

Only in the last couple hundred or so years did they expose their operations to the public, suggesting it wasn’t only humans at the helm of it.

My guess was other supernaturals were involved, and that had been made evident by the Seven.

They’d been delving in genetic and magical mutations for far longer than what made sense to their primitive science. Thanks to that fucking nonsense, it took forever to find Reyna again even with our bond. By the time I did, it was too late. The Reyna I knew was too far gone.

Imprisoned the way she was, the chaos magic had consumed her body and mind over the decades.

Any longer and it would’ve consumed both her and the realm.

At least I’d thought so because power like that couldn’t be contained.

Power like that made our kind thirsty and never satisfied. I’d seen it happen with my mother.

In a lucid moment, Reyna pleaded with me to help end her life, to take the pain away, to end her suffering.

I was one of few who could, so I did. I gave her the relief and dignity of death.

It was all I could do for her after everything the Organization had already subjected her to.

Horrors I remembered every time I killed one of theirs.

It might’ve been the poison I offered to her and she quickly consumed to end her life—I couldn’t intentionally kill her with our bond, but I could give her the tool to do it—but it was the Organization who killed Reyna in the end.

They’d done to my sweet mate what she always feared; they made her exactly like my mother.

Like the fearsome twelve Originals at the end of their reign.

All that was left was chaos and darkness when I found her again.

The Originals were as bad as the stories said.

The first of our kind. Fae with access to chaos.

Fae who could cross realms at will. My mother, Hera, who’d led their group of twelve, was consumed by chaos over the thousands of years she’d used it.

Her and the Nether Royals were cut from the same cloth, drunk on power.

But Reyna and I hadn’t been corrupted by chaos when the Originals were destroyed in a fight with the Nether Royals and their army.

Or so I thought until Lyra showed the fuck up.

Those of us who survived made it our responsibility to persuade those like us against its use and breed outside our kind so that our potent Royal Siren magic weakened over the generations.

It worked for long enough to get comfortable.

Long enough to forget we were being hunted.

It’d kept us out of the Nether Royals’ sight until they developed a way to detect even mixed blood.

When we lost the ones we’d trained in droves—Fae we’d built communities with and shared history, completely removed from the Originals, innocent to their true power—Reyna and I fled the realm.

I never thought I’d come back here. I’d left this part of myself behind centuries ago, but V had a way of changing my perspective on things I’d thought unmovable.

Any reason to bind myself to her felt like it was worth whatever future it led to.

If I had to be bound by association with the annoying as shit Dark King everyone feared, then so be it.

With her, I didn’t want to be jaded and distant from my heart.

I wanted to embrace a new beginning and future.

Around her, I was rediscovering the person I’d been with Reyna, and I’d fucking missed it.

I’d missed the hope and joy, the laughter and pining.

Maybe because I hadn’t been paying attention, but I’d missed it all.

She’d given me back pieces of my soul.

Cassius’s glares were lost on me as our magic slipped out and surrounded the gem between us.

All I could focus on was V and how beautiful she was.

I’d seen her hellfire and abilities, but I’d never seen her magic produce color.

The red mirrored her gorgeous hair. It wove around my multicolored magic.

Then the gem caught fire and burned with the power of the two combining.

V's eyes glowed red and rose to meet mine, which were already burning a bright amber. “This tickles,” she whispered under her breath, trying her best not to smile but failing miserably.

I couldn’t help but smile back. “What? Were you hoping for pain instead?”

Her tongue clicked and her soft hand squeezed around mine in punishment as they hovered over the gem. “No, obviously. Just didn’t think I’d be fighting off the urge to giggle while we did this.”

Cassius cleared his throat, his scowl aimed solely at me. The asshole was painfully transparent when it came to his obsession with V. “Focus. No talking.”

V hid her smile and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The tingling between us grew intense for several minutes before the light and magic faded. The gem cracked and broke to pieces under our hand, and I let loose a sigh.

I hadn’t meant to hold my breath. It wasn’t common for a magical bond to fail, but not zero. I’d been terrified that since V was a hybrid, it wouldn’t bind the way it should.

I searched her eyes for another confirmation that it’d worked. I didn’t trust anything but her right now. Not even my own body.

Her gasp was sharp and soft. “Wow,” she murmured, lashes fluttering. “Is that…”

“Our magic,” I answered.

V’s head lolled back. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

The intoxicating live wires of her incredible power worked their way through my nerves, and I could only agree with a nod.

Cassius made a noise of protest. “You have, love. Our bond was merely overpowered by everything else we were doing.”

“Whatever you say, my dude,” V slurred, drunk on my magic. “I’m going to have a hell of a time focusing with both of you around. Who thought this would be a good idea, anyway?”

“You’ll grow accustomed to it,” Cassius encouraged, sweeping over to her like it was the only place he was meant to be. “I’ll help you, dove.”

She waved him away, giggling. “Oh? Is that what your hand is doing on my hip?”

“Precisely.”

“Liar.”

I rolled my eyes. Annoying wasn’t a strong enough word for him, the fucking simp.

“Is it meant to feel this good? I’m shivery all over, but like, in a good way.” Her lustful eyes met mine in a lazy upward glance.

I smirked, more than a little proud my magic had that sort of effect on her. “Means that our magic likes each other.”

Her soft laughter was music to my ears. “You make it sound like it’s got a mind of its own.”

My grin grew. “Oh, it does. Fae magic especially. It’s entrenched in our emotions and personality. It’s a reflection of us in a way.”

The princess hovering nearby sneered. “That’s rather overstated, devil woman. It’s not a sentient being.”

“Never said it was, princess, but you can’t argue it embodies parts of us,” I said with quick a glare of reproach.

He huffed but didn’t argue, still crouched next to her like he never intended to leave her side.

“How long will it feel like this?” she asked me, ignoring the man next to her. “It’s pretty distracting, so I don’t think we should do any training until it settles down.”

My thumb stroked her hand. I hadn’t bothered to let go. I didn’t want to. “Not too long. Maybe a few hours.”

“Seems like everything here happens in a cycle of a few hours,” she bemoaned, but her smile suggested it didn’t bother her.

At least not this. “Guess that’s that. We’ll wait this thing out and get started on training my mind and magic, get whatever favors Cash needs, then show our faces in front of Lyra.

I don’t want to give that shadowy bastard time to come to his senses. ”

She was right, of course. Long story short, shit was complicated.

Lyra would be on a warpath the minute she realized she’d been outwitted by a magical bond. With their mate bond, Aram was likely to find V again, so Lyra wouldn’t want to risk being around her more than necessary.

That worked in our favor.