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It would take too fucking long to climb the rock face to get to her.

Shadows surged beneath my feet, and despite the risk, I stepped into them without hesitation.

Agony tore through every nerve as the void welcomed me home, cold and ravenous, peeling flesh from bone with the brutal familiarity of an old friend. Time ceased to exist. There was only darkness... and the desperate certainty that if I did not reach her now, I would lose everything to this abyss.

Not today.

I ripped myself free.

Crimson moonlight exploded across my vision as I crashed onto the jagged stone, one knee shattering the rock beneath me.

I rose, shadows unfurling around me like living smoke as the black veins beneath my skin throbbed and spread. The world sharpened. I felt every heartbeat. Every breath.

My gaze snapped to Helion, and there was nothing human left in my eyes.

“Get your fucking hands off my bonded.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Rotting Heart

Lyra

“Get your fucking hands off my bonded.”

Rythos’ words echoed before being swallowed by the eerie fog pressing down on us.

My shoulders sagged the moment he burst from the shadows, snarling with a feral rage that could have flattened kingdoms.

Rythos.

The world narrowed until there was nothing left but him.

Every hour spent wondering if I had already lost him fell away beneath the crushing relief of simply seeing him breathe. It hit me so hard my knees threatened to buckle. He was alive. Gods... he was alive.

My relief curdled like the innards of a waterlogged corpse as I truly looked at him. Purple bruises rested beneath the skin of his onyx eyes. His cheeks had hollowed, and an unkempt beard shadowed the sharp line of his jaw. Grief had stripped him down to the bones of the monster I loved, leaving only a Commander held together by stubborn devotion.

My stomach twisted, breath coming in ragged bursts that refused to fill my lungs.

Black veins snaked over the sculpted muscle of his chest and abdomen, writhing beneath his flesh as if alive. It led to a dark area of rot festering on the left side of his chest as if it were consuming his heart.

Is that what loving me was doing to him?

Rotting him from the inside out?

My knees threatened to collapse beneath me.

Tears clung to my lashes, the weight of guilt forcing my gaze to the sheer rock beneath my bare feet. But not before I saw a flicker of hurt in the endless depths of Rythos’ eyes that shattered my breaking heart.

“What an entrance.” Helion gripped the bindings around my wrist and pressed me against his body. “Also, she happens to like my hands on her.”

In a split decision, I stopped struggling and let myself melt against Helion’s side.

The way Rythos tracked the movement pulled tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back before they could betray me.

Perhaps if I gave him a reason not to love me, it would buy me more time to save him.

Rythos once told me it was not what you were that made you evil, but your intentions. If I hurt him to save him from death, was it truly evil?