Page 46

“No, Sunshine. Not a snake.” His voice dropped closer to my ear. “I’m your husband, and I am trying to help you.” He put his hand over my mouth, silencing me before I could speak. “Shh, just listen for once.”

I tried to wrench free, but he held me tighter, my back pressing into the hard planes of his body.

“Relax,” he murmured into the crook of my neck, his breath warm against my skin, sending a ripple of gooseflesh down my spine. To anyone watching, he would look like a lover pressing a kiss to my throat.

“I know you’re angry with me, but I need you to listen,” he breathed against my skin.

My pulse stuttered and I squirmed, but he didn’t loosen his hold. I didn’t want to play anymore fucking games. All I wanted was to be free. Free from lies. Free from bonds.

“Dying is not permanent during the damned trials, but it fucking hurts. It feels very real.” His grip tightened slightly, voice cracking, and a sliver of fear coiled in my stomach.

Ash drifted from the dark grey sky, clinging to the twisted trees around us. “Stay close to me,” he went on, quieter now, lips pressing against my skin, as if he were losing an internal battle. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Your scent is very distracting.”

My breath caught, disgust twisting through me at how my body betrayed me, leaning into his touch like it craved the warmth I should have rejected.

I lunged out of his grip so suddenly that I lost balance as I turned and levelled him with a glare.

“Do not touch me,” I snapped.

His dimples flashed, that obnoxious smirk making his eyes shine with amusement, and he held his hands up in defence. “Sunshine, one of these days, you’re going to beg me to touch you.”

Heat crawled up my neck in angry splotches, imagining what it would be like to drown him.

“I would rather die.”

The words hung between us, a flicker of something passing over Helion’s face so fast that if I’d blinked, I would have missed it. Hurt? Worry? Anger?

“Except it won’t be you who dies, will it?” His chuckle was a light, amused thing that brushed against my skin like the first rays of sunlight.

I hated it.

When he laughed, he was Riven. And everything about Riven was warm and infectious.

A fucking lie.

He was a deceitful shell of someone I thought was a friend. If I opened my legs for him and he did not know how to save Rythos, I would be fooled twice by the same male. That was a risk I was apprehensive about taking.

“When does this game start so I can spill your blood?” I challenged, looking up through my lashes at him. I would have loved nothing more than to claw his neck open and watch his blood spill like ink.

“No, Sunshine,” he tsked. “We’re the exception,” he said, voice laced with something darker as his hand drifted over the matching soul bond mark etched into his skin. “Not only are we bonded, but our marriage bound our lives together, so it is us against the other prisoners.”

“Rythos is my bonded,” I seethed, anger twisting my words into venom as I held up my hand with my new mark. “This is fake.” I glared up at him, and he let go of my waist. But I wouldn’t retreat. I would not let him see how much he was crawling under my skin.

“Lyra is Rythos’ bonded. But Maraveth was mine, and you absorbed her soul relics. Making you her as much as you are you… which means yes, you are his. But you are also mine.”

Heat pressed in from every direction, thick and suffocating—burning me alive from the inside out. It clawed down my throat, stealing the air from my lungs as I staggered back.

No. It couldn’t be true.

The bond between us was Cerilla’s magic. A trick. Another lie. It had to be deception.

Each jagged breath scraped my lungs raw, never enough. It felt like drowning all over again. The world spun, my hands tingling with every frantic beat of my heart as my reality fractured around me.

“Hey,” Helion murmured, ducking his head down to my eye level. His hands cradled my face, yet I could hardly feel the touch. “Eyes on me.”

The bond in my chest flared—cool and soothing. Chasing the fire consuming me like water over flame. His storm-grey eyes flecked with amber filled my vision, burning with concern and something dangerously close to adoration. I sucked in a sharp intake of breath. But his gaze held me captive. It kept me from slipping under. From drowning.

“What can you feel?” he asked gently, but his voice sounded far away, as if I were underwater.