Chapter 90
Sera POV
I could barely remember how I got home.
I walked through the village in a daze, the basket clutched so tightly against my chest that my fingers ached. The world around me felt muted, like sound wrapped in thick wool. The laughter of children, the smell of roasted maize, the distant clang of a blacksmith’s hammer – everything was too far away, too unreal, as if I were only half inside my own body.
Lucien’s words wouldn’t leave me.
Remember the silver chains. The altar. The blade.
I tried to push it down to bury it the way I had buried every splinter of that other life. But it clung to me like smoke, like the scent of fire trapped in hair long after the flames were gone.
When I finally returned to the stronghold, I slipped past the guards unnoticed. I didn’t want to see Jade. I didn’t want him to look at me and see what was still burning under my skin.
I went straight to my room, set the basket aside, and curled into myself on the bed.
The mark on my neck pulsed.
A heartbeat that was not my own.
I whispered to him, maybe to him, that I’m still here. I’m yours.
I don’t know if it was reassurance or a plea.
At some point, exhaustion finally dragged me under.
And I dreamed.
—
The world was made of twilight and smoke.
Ash drifted like snow.
The sky glowed the colour of dying embers.
I stood barefoot on stone, the air warm against my skin. And when I looked up, Jade was there, his silver eyes burning like molten moonlight, his hand reaching for me. His touch was familiar, possessive, and grounding. When his fingers grazed my jaw, I felt my breath catch just as it always did. I leaned into him without thinking.
His voice was too low.
“Sera.”
And then there was another voice.
“Sera.”
Lucien stepped from the smoke behind me, his eyes like dark flame, his presence a quiet, devastating gravity that pulled at something deep inside my ribs. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t have to. My blood remembered him.
Jade’s hand tightened on my waist.
Lucien’s breath warmed the back of my neck.
And suddenly I was between them, caught by force and by inevitability.
The air changed.
Jade’s lips brushed my shoulder, slow and aching.
Lucien’s fingers ghosted my fingertips, barely there, enough to make my pulse stumble.
Heat surged through me, silver fire and shadowed flame threading together, licking up my spine, burning, consuming, claiming.
My legs trembled.
I tried to speak to say 'stop', 'choose', or 'please', but the words melted into a breathless sound that didn’t belong to innocence or denial.
Their hands moved with two different kinds of desire.
Jade’s was fierce, desperate, and needing to possess.
Lucien’s was dark, knowing, promising release and ruin in equal measure.
The heat twisted.
Pleasure blurred into something sharper; the fire became chains, silver and burning.
One end wrapped around my wrist. The other around Jade’s throat. Another coiled around mine.
Lucien’s hand closed over the chains, pulling. Jade pulled back.
My body arched between them, caught in a tension so intense it felt like my heart would tear.
The fire roared too bright, too damn hot…
And pain shattered through the dream as the chains wrapped around my lungs, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe.
I screamed and woke.
—
I sat upright in bed, gasping.
My skin was damp. My pulse was wild. The mark on my neck throbbed like it was alive, like it remembered everything I had just seen.
The night air was cold, but my body burnt.
I pressed my palm against my chest, trying to hold myself together, but my hands were shaking too hard to do anything but tremble.
I whispered into the darkness:
“What is happening to me?”
The dream clung to my skin like sweat.
I could still feel Jade’s fingers on my waist – hot, anchoring, desperate.
I could still feel Lucien’s breath against my neck – soft, deep, knowing.
I could still feel the heat that had twisted through me, raw enough to unravel bone.
And the chains burnt not just in the dream, but here as I was awake, like some invisible fire was still wrapped around my wrists, my throat, and my heart. I rubbed at my arms, at my chest, as if I could erase the memory through sheer force. But the ache only deepened, blooming into something heavy and hollow all at once.
My breath faltered.
The whisper came from somewhere I couldn’t place inside me or around me; I didn’t know. It was soft but loud enough to split straight through my spine.
Choice will make your fate.
The words trembled through the air, through my bones, through the place the mark lived beneath my skin. I swallowed hard and covered my ears, but it didn’t stop.
“No,” I breathed, my voice barely holding itself together. “No… I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.”
My fingers dug into my hair.
The dream, the fire, the chains – none of it was fading. It pulsed behind my eyes, alive, growing, waiting.
I felt like I was standing at the edge of something I couldn’t see the bottom of. My throat tightened painfully. It wasn’t just desire that terrified me.
It was recognition.
I had known both of them in another life.
In another death. Jade’s face in the moonlight and Lucien’s voice in the shadows.
My own scream wrapped in flame. My skin broke into a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold.
“I don’t want to choose,” I whispered into the quiet, though I already knew that not choosing was a choice in itself. “I just want to breathe. I just want to exist.”
But the mark on my neck pulsed again, slow, steady, and relentless, reminding me that my existence was already bound.
And somewhere deep in my chest, something responded; it was a flicker of silver fire.
I stared straight ahead into the darkness, throat tight, breath uneven, the whisper still echoing inside me like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to this world.
Choice will carve your fate.
And I already knew the time to choose was approaching, no matter how tightly I tried to hold back the tide.