Chapter 1 PROLOGUE
Flames licked the shattered stones of the courtyard, casting long, trembling shadows across walls that had once held life, laughter, and light. Smoke curled into the night sky, thick and choking, tasting of ash and ruin. Magic hummed in the air — dark, heavy, alive — wrapping around her like a living thing.
He stood there, framed by the inferno, as though the fire itself had forged him. Golden eyes met hers across the chaos, unblinking, unyielding, eternal. Auren. The King of Drakorath. The man who had haunted her nightmares and, somehow, her waking thoughts.
“You should not have come here,” he said quietly, though every word rolled like distant thunder, heavy with accusation and power.
Haven’s pulse hammered in her ears. “You burned an entire village,” she spat, voice trembling, raw with disbelief. “They were innocent! Children…”
“Innocent?” His lips curved in a faint, almost imperceptible smirk. “Do you know what they carried beneath their temple, little mortal? What they prayed to every full moon?”
“I don’t care what you think they did!” Her voice cracked, a brittle sound against the roar of the flames. “You slaughtered them like beasts!”
Auren’s jaw tightened. In a heartbeat, he was before her, the air between them thrumming with power, a living, dangerous pulse. Haven stumbled back, only to have his hand shoot out, catching her wrist — firm, unyielding, impossibly steady.
“Careful,” he murmured, voice low and intimate. “You’re still breathing because I allow it. I didn't let you live so a bunch of naive kids with no hometraining can kill you “
The words should have made her tremble. Almost did. But instead, a defiance flared inside her, hot and sharp.
“Then stop allowing it,” she whispered, her voice trembling but daring him. “End it. Do it.”
For a long, suspended moment, silence. The fire seemed to pause mid-flicker, caught in the tension of his hesitation.
Auren’s golden gaze fell to her lips, then back to her eyes. “You think death would free you from me?”
Haven tried to pull her hand free, but his grip didn’t loosen. Not cruelly. Not violently. But it held a weight she couldn’t ignore, and her breath caught as heat radiated off him in waves she hadn’t expected.
“You’re bound to me now,” he said, voice low, intimate, the sound seeming to draw the flames closer as if they too were listening. “By blood. By magic. By choice , even if you don’t remember making it.”
Her chest heaved. “I would never choose you.”
He leaned closer, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath brushing her cheek, could feel the danger that lay beneath the calm. “You already did, Haven,” he whispered, almost reverently. “The moment you looked at me… and lived. And I will do anything to keep you safe. Including burning down the entire continent.”
Her breath hitched, and the fire around them surged in response, twisting and coiling like serpents of light and heat. It was no longer just consuming the world. It was consuming her.
And in that instant, she understood — this was not merely survival. This was a binding. This was the first pulse of something older, darker, and far more dangerous than either of them could name.
The flames reflected in his eyes, golden and endless, and she knew, with a shiver that ran down her spine and straight into her bones, that nothing would ever be the same again. Not the world. Not the fire
. Not her.
And certainly, not him.