Chapter 13: Khael

The veil is thin tonight.

I slip through it without a sound, pulling threads of shadow around me like a second skin. Elunara dreams, and I walk quietly behind her thoughts. She doesn’t know I’m here, but I watch.

She walks alone in a field she has yet to see when she’s awake. Fog brushes at her ankles like mist with intention, and the moon above bathes everything in a silver-blue glow. Her hair is wild, unbound by reason. Her body moves as if it knows this place, though her mind still resists.

She’s searching for something she doesn’t yet understand.

And I… I am hunting clarity.

For over a century, I’ve kept my distance from desire. I’ve been the crown’s enforcer, my king’s ghost, a dagger in the dark. Desire has no place where death lives. Yet this woman—the one with storm light in her eyes and power sleeping in her blood—she awakens something I don’t recognize. Something feral. Something unwise.

She turns her head as if sensing me in the fog. My breath stills. Even in dreams, her intuition flares. She’s not ordinary.

Elunara, daughter of the cursed line. The witch’s mistake and the Hollow’s salvation.

Her body trembles slightly as she moves deeper into the dream. Her senses are heightened here. The land calls to her even while she sleeps, and her body responds with each footstep into the ancestral field. Her breasts rise with each shallow breath. Her skin prickles with need building beneath the surface.

I could reveal myself now. Step from the shadows, let her see me. But I hesitate. Not out of fear. I’ve never feared a thing.

But I do not wish to fracture what has only just begun.

Instead, I watch.

Darius and Vastian are here too, shaped in her dreaming mind as figures on the edges of her awakening. Darius’s horns flash briefly in the moonlight before fading. She doesn’t seem to register what she saw. Not consciously. But deep inside her, she knows.

And then there’s me—a whisper in her mind, a warmth against her spine, the eyes she cannot find but always feel.

I want to speak her name.

I want to touch her.

She shifts again in the dream; the moonlight trails across the soft curve of her throat like a lover’s touch. Her breath is slow, uneven. I match it without meaning to. Inhale. Exhale. My body syncs with hers as if drawn by gravity or some buried code of instinct.

The scent of her—of something fertile and forbidden—rises in the air around us. It’s not a fragrance I can name, but I feel it crawling under my skin. Earth. Heat. Rain on skin. I imagine the taste of her against my tongue, wild and untempered, and the thought cleaves clean through the last of my discipline.

My hands ache to touch.

My mouth aches to take.

The beast inside me—silent for decades—stirs.

Not softly.

Not kindly.

It wants.

Her body calls to something ancient in me, something feral and blood-bound, and I feel the thrum of that pull like a drum line in my bones. This isn’t desire. This is possession. A connection winding tight and cruel, dragging me forward with the need to mark her, to claim what was forged for me long before her first breath ever touched this world.

My fingers twitch.

I want to rip the dream open. Step fully into it. Take her. Ruin her. Worship her. All at once.

But I don’t.

Because if I do, I won’t stop.

And if I don’t stop, there will be no line between dream and waking.

No line between Khael and the shadow I was made to be.

So I drag myself back. Away from the heat of her. Away from the sound of her soft, shallow breath.

But I feel it still—her body, her soul—threaded into the darkest places of mine.

I’ve walked through thousands of dreams.

But none have ever walked through me.

Until now.

So I retreat, one breath away from shattering us both.

Elunara stirs as if feeling the absence of something she didn’t know was present. Her nipples harden against the thin fabric of her sleep-shirt, and a soft moan escapes her lips. My hands clench. My teeth grind.

I am not built to feel this way.

I’ve killed kings for less than this distraction.

But she is not a distraction. She is the curse and the cure. The one who broke the loop. The one born when the witch’s incantation finally expired.

She is everything.

And if she unravels me… I will let her.

The veil between her mind and mine grows thin. Too thin.

I shouldn’t be this close. Shouldn’t be breathing the air inside her dream as if it’s my own. But I am.

She’s sprawled beneath the fractured moonlight, limbs slack in a way that speaks not of sleep, but surrender. The air smells like wet earth and something sweeter beneath it—ripe, ready, wanting.

And I am losing the edge I’ve spent a lifetime mastering.

I’ve seen enough. I turn to leave.

But then her lips part.

Soft, cracked from the wind. Whispering.

“Khael…”

My name.

Not spoken. Not gasped. Breathed.

It hits like a blade made of pure energy, cleaving straight through the heart I didn’t know existed inside my chest.

She shouldn’t know it. No one told her. Not Darius. Not Vastian. Not even the land, though it’s beginning to whisper to her in other ways.

But she says it anyway.

Not with fear.

With knowing.

As if the marrow of her bones has always held it… waiting for me to return.

A low wind slithers through the trees behind her. The drums fade, and the only sound left is her breath.

I step closer—close enough to feel the heat rising off her skin, close enough to forget every rule written in blood and shadow.

She shifts, a tremor running through her limbs. And for a moment, her body arches like it remembers me from another life. One where I was hers.

The beast inside me stretches, ready to claim its coveted treasure.

But I force myself back.

Not because I want to. Because I must. Because if I touch her now, there will be no turning back. No returning to the man they think I am.

I peel away from the dream, dissolving into shadow and silence, the way I always have.

Only this time, I carry her voice with me.

My name, spoken by a girl who should not know it.

And somehow, that one breath of sound feels more dangerous than any curse ever cast.