Chapter 18

Elara's POV

The full moon rose two nights later, and I felt the change in Kael before I ever saw it, a restlessness that crept into him over the course of the afternoon,

His hands flexing at his sides during a meeting with visiting border guards, his voice growing shorter and more clipped as the hours wore on toward evening.

"You should stay in the castle tonight," he told me, finding me in the library where I'd been trying and failing to focus on the text Nyra had left for me.

"I don't know what tonight will look like yet, not with everything Nyra's been testing these past weeks. I won't risk you being anywhere near me if it goes wrong."

"I'm not hiding in my room while you go through this alone," I said, closing the book and standing to face him. "You said yourself the bond responds to intention. If there's a chance being near me helps, even a little, doesn't it make sense for me to be there?"

"And if it doesn't help? If I lose control the way I have every full moon for the past decade?" His jaw was tight, something raw and frightened underneath the careful control he usually wore like armor. "I won't have that be the thing that hurts you, Elara. I won't survive knowing I was the reason."

"Then we do it carefully," I said. "Nyra can be nearby. Soren too. We don't have to test the whole theory blindly tonight. But I'm not going to sit in a locked room while you go through this thinking I abandoned you the moment it got difficult. That's not what this is. That's not what I want us to be."

Something in his expression cracked open at that, the fear giving way to something softer, more vulnerable than I'd seen from him even in our quietest moments at the cottage. "You deserve someone who doesn't ask this much of you. Someone whose worst nights don't come with actual danger attached."

"I deserve to choose for myself what I'm willing to face," I said, echoing words I'd used with Vesna without quite meaning to. "And I choose this. I choose you, tonight and whatever it looks like."

We compromised in the end, Nyra insisting on a warded room deep in the castle, thick stone walls reinforced with old protective symbols she'd spent the afternoon carefully redrawing, Soren stationed just outside the door with strict instructions on when to intervene if things went wrong, and me inside with Kael, close enough to reach him, far enough to run if it truly came to that.

The transformation began just after moonrise, and I'd never watched it happen slowly before, not the way I did that night, Kael's breathing growing ragged as his body began to shift, bones cracking and reshaping in ways that clearly caused him pain despite how many times he'd lived through it before, his eyes flashing between the dark brown I'd grown to know and a wild, feral gold that didn't look like him at all.

"Kael," I said softly, staying still even as every instinct screamed at me to back away from the massive black wolf now pacing the length of the room, muscles coiled tight, a low growl building in his throat that hadn't been there in our fight against the rogues, something angrier, more lost.

He turned toward me, and for one terrible moment I saw nothing familiar in those golden eyes at all, just hunger and rage and something that looked disturbingly like the rogues that had attacked me in the forest, and I heard Soren shift anxiously just outside the door, ready to burst through if I gave any signal at all.

I didn't run.

I stepped forward instead, slow, careful, the way I'd learned to move around skittish animals as a child, and I held out my hand, palm up, the mark on my wrist catching the low candlelight.

"I know you're in there," I said quietly. "I know this isn't all you are. Come back to me, Kael. Please."

The wolf's growl deepened, and for a heartbeat I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, that Vesna's warning and every fear Kael himself had voiced were about to prove true in the worst possible way, and then he lunged.

I didn't have time to flinch before his massive head pushed into my outstretched palm instead of teeth finding my throat, a whine building low in his chest, something desperate and pained, and the mark on my wrist flared bright silver, warmth spreading up my arm and into my chest as I felt something in the room shift, the wild rage bleeding slowly out of the air around us.

"That's it," I whispered, running my free hand along the thick black fur of his neck, feeling him shudder under my touch. "You're still you. You didn't lose yourself. Not tonight."

The wolf sank down slowly until he was lying at my feet, massive head resting against my knee, and I lowered myself carefully to the floor beside him, keeping my hand pressed against the fur over his racing heart, murmuring quiet, steady words until the tension in his enormous body eased fully away.

By the time the moon crossed fully overhead and began its slow descent, Kael shifted back, human and exhausted, curled against me on the stone floor with his head resting in my lap, and I stroked my fingers through his hair while he breathed slow and even, more peaceful than I'd ever seen him.

"You stayed," he murmured, voice rough with exhaustion.

"I told you I would."

"I've never made it through a full moon without losing myself completely. Not once in a hundred years." He turned his face up to look at me, something wondering and raw in his expression. "You did that. Whatever this is between us, Elara, it's real. It's working."

I bent down and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead, the first real kiss either of us had dared since the forest, and felt the mark between us pulse warm and steady, like a heartbeat that belonged to both of us now instead of just one.

"Then we keep going," I said softly. "One full moon at a time, until there's nothing left of the curse to fight."