Chapter 07 (Part 04)

The memory crashes over me like a wave, vivid and merciless as always.

I remember the scream—high and sharp and full of terror. I remember the blood, so much blood, painting the forest floor in patterns that still haunt my dreams. The way her body went limp in my arms, all that vibrant life suddenly gone. The heat fading from her skin while I held her, begging her to stay, promising things I should have promised years earlier.

The bond tearing loose like it was physically ripping out of me, leaving a wound that never fully healed.

The pain never left.

It just went quiet, settled into the background of my existence like a chronic ache I learned to live with.

Until now.

Now it’s back—louder. Angrier. Needier than it ever was before.

And it doesn’t care that the new one is human, fragile in ways my kind isn’t meant to understand or navigate.

That she has no idea what she is to me, what I am to her.

That I hate the bond for choosing again, for dragging me back into this nightmare when I’d finally found a way to exist in the spaces between hope and despair.

It only cares that she exists.

And that I’m not beside her.

I grind my palm into my ribs, trying to snuff out the fire that’s been building there since the moment I saw her face.

But it doesn’t go out.

It grows, fed by her fear, by her confusion, by the strength I can already sense in her even as she fights against what we’re becoming.

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POV: Dual (Ivy & Cassian)

**IVY**

The house is dark now, wrapped in the kind of silence that feels heavy with secrets.

Elsie went to bed hours ago—or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’s just hiding behind closed doors again, pretending like any of this can still be contained, like the careful walls she’s built around this house’s supernatural heart haven’t just come crashing down.

I sit on the edge of the bed with my knees pulled up, hoodie sleeves pulled down over my hands, eyes fixed on the window that looks out toward the woods.

The trees are nothing but dark shapes against a darker sky, but I know he’s out there somewhere. The knowledge sits in my chest like a stone, heavy and undeniable.

The woods are quiet, but the pull in my chest hasn’t stopped.

If anything, it’s worse now. More insistent.

Tighter.

Hotter.

My skin feels like it’s two sizes too small, stretched tight over bones that seem to be humming with energy. Every nerve ending is hypersensitive, every sound amplified until I can hear my own heartbeat like thunder in my ears.

Every time I close my eyes, I *see* him. That face—sharp angles and golden eyes and a mouth that looked like it was carved for sin. Those eyes that seemed to look right through me, past every defense I’d ever built, straight to something raw and unprotected at my core.

The way the room bent around him like gravity, like reality itself was reshaping to accommodate his presence.

I don’t know his story.

I don’t know his voice, what it sounds like when he’s not surrounded by the electric tension that filled that café.

I don’t know what he’d do to me if I let him close, what this bond actually means in practical terms.

But I know his name.

Not because anyone said it in my hearing.

Not because Elias whispered it like a curse, though I could see the knowledge in his eyes.

Because something *inside me* already knew it, had always known it, was just waiting for the right moment to whisper it into my consciousness.

The knowledge sits in my mind like it was always supposed to be there, foreign and familiar at the same time.

I open my mouth, and the sound comes out like a confession, like a prayer I never meant to say.

“Cassian.”

The second I say it, something shudders through me from head to toe.

Like the bond just breathed, like saying his name out loud has fed it somehow, made it stronger.

Like the thread between us just *tightened.*

-----

**CASSIAN**

I’m alone again in the darkness between trees, the scent of pine and earth and old magic heavy in the air.

Elias is gone, disappeared back to whatever sanctuary he maintains in this town full of secrets. He has his own burdens to carry, his own supernatural fires to tend. He’s helped as much as he can tonight.

The woods are silent except for the usual symphony of night sounds—owl calls, the rustle of small creatures, the whisper of wind through bare branches.

But something changes.

The fire in my side *spikes,* not pain exactly but something more like recognition.

Like an echo.

Like a call being answered.

I press my hand against the scar and feel it pulse with warmth that has nothing to do with my own body temperature.

And then I hear it, carried on a wind that shouldn’t exist, a voice that shouldn’t reach me across the miles between the deep woods and whatever safe house she’s hiding in.

Soft. Uncertain. Tinged with fear and longing and something that might be acceptance.

My name.

Not her name, which I somehow know without ever having heard it spoken. *Ivy.* The knowledge sits in my mind like it was always supposed to be there.

*Mine.*

Because somehow—across miles of fog and blood and silence—*she said it too.*

She spoke my name into the darkness, and the bond heard her. Fed on the sound of it. Grew stronger.

The words slip from my lips before I can stop them, a whisper that carries more weight than any shout.

“Ivy.”

And the bond?

It’s listening.

It’s growing.

And despite everything I know about the dangers ahead, despite the terror I can sense radiating from her across the distance between us, despite the memory of blood and loss that haunts every quiet moment—

I don’t fight it this time.

Because she said my name like it mattered.

Like maybe, just maybe, she’s as lost in this as I am.