Chapter 127 ...
Daevir POV
The word echoed against broken trees and blood-soaked earth.
And impossibly…
They did.
Both monstrous forms froze mid-lunge.
Claws hovered inches from flesh. Jaws remained bared, breath ragged and steaming in the cold air.
Slowly, too slowly, their heads turned toward me.
Two sets of burning eyes locked onto mine.
Blue.
Amber.
Alpha and Emperor.
Brothers of the Rogue wolf the South.
For a heartbeat, I felt like prey caught between them.
I forced my shaking legs to hold me upright.
“There will be no more spilling of blood on the Blue Moon,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “Not tonight!”
The sacred light filtered down through the trees, pale and merciless.
Ezriel’s lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Easy for you to say.” He snapped at me.
The sound was violent, sharp enough to make several warriors flinch.
I did not.
“You kill children on any moon.” The force of his voice when he spoke vibrated through my bones.
My breath faltered.
Ezriel took a step toward me despite the blood pouring from his wounds.
“You blinded Ares,” he snarled. “You cursed my son.”
The name twisted inside me.
Ares.
So that was his name.
“And I will not stop,” he continued, voice lowering into something colder, more deliberate, “until you crumble to pieces, Amarien.”
The venom in those words pierced deeper than claws ever could.
My knees nearly buckled, but I straightened i tiled my head up to match his eyes.
For a second, just one, I saw the child in my mind again.
Small.
Blind.
Reaching for a light he would never see.
My chest caved inward.
My baby.
Ezriel’s massive frame trembled with restrained violence.
And then…
He shifted.
The transformation was abrupt, almost violent in reverse. Bones snapping back, fur receding, towering form collapsing inward until Daevir stood where the beast had been.
Human.
Bare skin streaked with blood.
Chest rising and falling in harsh breaths.
His amber eyes, those eyes, were still blazing at me.
There was something still shattered in his expression now.
Unquenched vengeance.
“I’ll be back,” His voice was low, controlled, and terrifying. “I promise.”
The words settled into my bones like prophecy.
He held my gaze for one final, unbearable moment.
Then he turned.
His remaining men gathered what wounded they could, retreating swiftly into the shadows of the forest.
Daevir did not look back.
Not once.
Within seconds, the night swallowed them.
And the clearing was left in silence beneath the Blue Moon.
I stood there long after the forest swallowed him.
My body felt detached from itself, as though I were watching a stranger standing in a blood-soaked clearing beneath a merciless moon.
My hands were trembling.
I hadn’t noticed until then.
“I’ll be back.”
His voice wouldn’t leave me.
It looped in my mind, steady and inevitable.
I barely felt Theron approach until his fingers brushed my arm.
I flinched.
He stepped closer, not wounded enough to slow him, not shaken enough to hide his awareness.
His silver eyes studied my face carefully.
And then his voice slipped into my mind.
Low. Intimate. And Unavoidable.
That’s what you get from the man you’re still in love with?
The words were not spoken aloud.
They didn’t need to be.
They slithered straight into the places I tried hardest to bury.
My breath caught.
“I am not…” I started, but the denial died before it reached my lips.
Theron’s gaze sharpened, reading everything I failed to hide.
You ran to stop me, his voice continued softly inside my head. Not him.
That shook me.
I had screamed for both of them to stop.
But my feet…
My heart…
Had moved for Daevir. For his life.
I pulled away from Theron’s touch.
“I need air,” I muttered, though the forest already stretched endlessly around us.
Before he could say anything more, before he could look deeper and twist my insides, I turned and ran.
I didn’t want him to see the crack forming beneath the mask.
Branches scraped my arms as I pushed through the trees. The sounds of the clearing faded behind me, replaced by the familiar hush of the deeper woods.
My vision blurred.
Not from the dark.
From tears.
I wiped at them angrily, but more followed.
“I hate you,” I whispered into the night.
I didn’t know if I meant Daevir.
Or myself.
Or the gods who delighted in breaking mothers.
The path beneath my feet was one I knew by heart. I had walked it in daylight and darkness, in grief and numbness, until it became the only place that felt like mine.
My sanctuary.
My punishment.
My place
My shrine!
I stumbled over a root and nearly fell, catching myself on a tree trunk before forcing myself onward.
The Blue Moon filtered through the canopy in fractured beams, lighting the small clearing ahead.
And there it was. Standing before me.
My hideaway. The reason I sneak out in Theron and everyone every night.
My little secret that mustn't be muttered to any soul on earth.
The shrine I had built with trembling hands and stubborn devotion.
Stones were stacked carefully into a small altar.
Wildflowers woven into crowns that wilted and were replaced again and again.
A tiny carved wooden baby I had shaped myself with a wounded heart and tears in my eyes, though my hands had never been skilled for such things.
I dropped to my knees before it.
The strength I had forced into my spine shattered.
I folded forward, pressing my forehead to the cold earth.
And I wept.
I cried the way I had the night they told me my child was gone.
My shoulders shook violently as sob after sob tore through me.
I wept that my heart leapt at the sight of him.
That the image of my baby that was now fading from my memory was awakened by his presence. His eyes. His scent!
That his pain had hardened into hatred so complete he would march armies to erase me.
I pressed my fingers into the soil beside the shrine.
“My baby,” I whispered hoarsely.
I had never even been allowed to bury you properly.
They took you from me before I could memorize your face.
They told me you were gone.
They told me to move on.
I clutched the small carved baby and pulled it against my chest.
“I tried to hate him,” I whispered through tears. “I tried so hard.”
But love does not die cleanly.
It rots.
It lingers.
It claws at you when you think you’ve outrun it.
“My baby!”