39A: FATED TO CELESTIALS

**MEDINA** 

The wind outside murmured of summer’s waning breath, rustling through the towering trees like a whisper passed between gods. 

Elijah’s study stood shrouded in amber twilight, the room lit only by the flickering hearth and the soft golden glow of candlelight. It cast long shadows upon the stone walls—walls that had heard too many secrets and too few confessions. My fingers hovered above the parchment on the table, but I did not read. I watched Elijah instead.

He stood, noble and distant, his shoulders cloaked in black silk, his long fingers trailing lazily down the spine of a leather-bound guest ledger. The scent of sandalwood clung to him—smoke, strength, and ruin.

Beside him, Phillip muttered names from a list they had been constructing for the past hour. A tedious affair, this annual gathering Elijah so thoughtfully orchestrated, a celebration of power and posturing wrapped in the veil of civility. Nobles, merchants, diplomats, bloodthirsty wolves in golden chains.

My gaze flickered to the edge of Elijah’s jaw. The light curved against it, sharp and holy. My breath stilled.

“I think we can do without the House of Caelus this year,” Phillip was saying, flipping a page with practiced indifference. “They’re too proud and too indebted.”

Elijah offered a grunt of agreement, eyes not leaving the scroll he was now studying. “Fine. Replace them with the Korran envoy. Their territory borders ours, and they’ve been sniffing around our trade lines.”

I smiled thinly, not at the politics, but at the poetry of it—wolves always sniffing.

“Medina,” Elijah said suddenly, not even glancing my way, “what do you think of inviting the Deltaran court? They’re fond of theatrics.”

“They’re fond of poison,” I replied dryly, drawing a smile from Phillip.

“Then they’ll fit in,” Elijah murmured. “Perfectly.”

But my mind… oh, my mind was not here. It was elsewhere—days back, or perhaps eons. The night of fire and madness. The night I had tried to kill Celeste.

I remembered the blade. The shimmer of it in moonlight. I remembered her eyes, wide and trembling, her voice ragged with disbelief. I had moved to strike her—she, the cursed girl who had slipped into Elijah’s orbit like a phantom, intoxicating and accursed. And as fate would demand, she had tried to kill him at the very same time.

We had both struck.

But neither target died.

Instead… they  fell.

Into something I still could not name.

It had not been death, but it had not been sleep either. It had been between. A place I, with all my years, had never known. Elijah’s body had crumpled beside hers, still breathing, but his soul gone to wherever hers  had wandered.

I had found him in that place, experiencing bliss in a lifetime where he fell in love with her in a coffee shop, and I had pulled him back. Not because I was merciful. No. Because I loved him.

Because I would never let her have him.

I didn’t understand it then.

But I did now.

After nights spent in communion with the forgotten gods of dust and sky, after blood offerings beneath moonlight and incense burned until my lungs felt hollow—I understood.

They were mates.

Fated.

Celeste and Elijah.

The gods had written it before they ever breathed.

I knew. And they did not.

Yet.

“Medina.”

His voice cut through me like wind over frost.

I blinked and looked up. Phillip was gone. I hadn’t even noticed his departure. The study now held only us and the distant silence of a house too still.

Elijah was watching me now, brow slightly furrowed. He leaned back against the edge of the table, arms crossed over his chest, one leg propped with the laziness of a king bored of his court. “You looked miles away.”

“I was,” I answered truthfully. “Further than that, perhaps.”

His gaze did not waver, and I hated that he could still see through me, even when I was draped in centuries of mystery. I shifted, tilting my chin up, feigning disinterest.

“Elijah,” I began softly, too softly, the weight of my question already dragging at my throat, “what would you do if… you found your mate?”

A pause. A beat. His lips parted, then closed again. It was a rare thing—to catch Elijah speechless.

“If I had one,” he said at last, voice low, “don’t you think I’d have found her in over a century of walking this earth?”

“But what if you haven’t?” I asked. “What if she’s out there still?”

He moved then. Slowly. Purposefully. He circled the table until he stood closer to me, the air between us electric with history and unspoken ache. His gaze searched mine, and for a moment I feared he saw too much.

“If I have a mate,” he said, voice dipped in something ancient and sorrowful, “then the universe has taken its time. It’s handed me grief and war, betrayal and loss. If there is a single kindness left for me—one true thread in all this unraveling—I would not waste it. I would embrace her. Entirely.”

His words struck me like shards of glass, burying themselves in places I’d long thought numb.

Entirely.

He would embrace her entirely.

Her.

Celeste.

The girl who bore his mark without even knowing it.

He took another step, his tone softening. “Why do you ask, Medina?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. My tongue curled around lies before I wove them into silk.

“It’s just a question,” I breathed. “Idle curiosity.”

“You’re not a woman who speaks without purpose.”

I offered a smile, slow and sharp. “Perhaps I wanted to know if there’s hope for men like you.”

“And what do you think?”

I rose then, moving past him toward the tall window, where the night bled in velvet streams across the stone floor. The stars glittered, too bright. Too cruel.

“I think…” I said, tracing a finger along the frost-laced glass, “that if fate is kind, she should never be found.”

The silence between us grew thick, laced with something neither of us dared to name.

Behind me, Elijah shifted. I could feel his gaze on my spine. I could feel him wondering.

“You’ve never believed in fate,” he said finally.

“I do now,” I whispered.

And I hated that I did.

Because if fate were real, then I had already lost.

She was his. And he was hers.