Chapter 397 397
Sabine POV
“I don’t understand.”
“We are different,” my wolf explains gently. “We haven’t shifted. We’re not fully connected not yet. I can take it. I can keep you safe.”
“How…?”
“You will become human again,” she says softly.
“What?”
“I can let it take me,” Damien wails suddenly. “Let it end with me.”
“No”
A silent tear slips free as I watch my brother unravel before my eyes.
“It’s the only option,” he continues, desperation threading every word. “It makes sense now. Why you wouldn’t accept me. Why I waited so long in the darkness. It was for this moment. I can wait a little longer until we are one again with the moon.”
“But it will kill you.”
“It’s the only way. You can live without me you’ve already proven that. Let me do this. Let me protect you.”
A sudden crash rips me fully out of the mind-link.
Maurice barrels past me, his body colliding with Damien as he drags my brother back from the edge of the gaping hole in the ground its hellish red glow pulsing like a living thing.
Then the scream comes.
Not human.
It rises from the shadows themselves layered, collective, cruel. They’re interfering. Twisting Damien’s thoughts. Forcing this choice on him.
“No!” I scream, fury tearing out of me. At them. At everything. “You will not take him. I won’t let you!”
Damien slams Maurice onto his back, his hands clamping around my mate’s throat. Maurice fights, claws at him but Damien is stronger, squeezing harder, cutting off his air.
“You can live without me,” my wolf says urgently, surging forward. “But not without the mate bond. That will destroy you.”
She takes control.
I lunge.
I don’t know how but she does.
I tear Damien off Maurice, throwing him back with inhuman strength. Once Maurice is breathing, once I know he’s alive, my hands move to Damien’s temples, fingers digging in deep.
I don’t let go.
He struggles, claws at my wrists, but I hold him there his knees hitting the stone as my grip locks him in place. I stare straight into his eyes.
Black.
Empty.
Demonic.
At this moment, he isn’t my brother.
He’s a vessel.
“You want this,” he hisses. “You can’t handle it.”
His voice is wrong too deep, hollow of emotion.
“Try me.”
I feel my lips curve into a defiant smile as Maurice’s voice screams through the bond, begging me to stop. I shove him back mentally, hard.
The red glow flares.
It closes around Damien and me, sealing us inside it. Maurice pounds against the barrier, but he can’t reach us.
“There has to be another way,” I plead to my wolf. I’m not ready to lose her. Not now. Not when I finally have her. “I can’t do this without you.”
Even though for so long that was exactly what I wanted.
How wrong I had been.
“This is our bloodline,” she says firmly. “Our forefathers’ sins. We will not let it take Dominique. Or Damien.”
She’s right.
Of course she is.
I just… didn’t want to lose her in the process.
I feel it then.
The temptation.
The promise of power.
The darkness turns its attention toward me studying, assessing. As the black drains from Damien’s eyes, I feel it slipping into mine. Tendrils of shadow coil through me, claiming me.
“Bee NO!”
Maurice’s voice reaches me faintly, muffled, already being swallowed by the dark.
The Garnier bloodline runs through Damien and through me. What bargains did our ancestors strike? What sins bought this power?
How fitting that it ends with me.
A woman.
The darkness seeps into my soul, floods my veins. I feel its glory, its hunger, its weight as it spreads claiming me completely.
My wolf begins to falter beneath it.
Struggling.
Fighting.
And for the first time, I don’t know which of us will survive.