ElenaI came back to myself lying on cold stone, Kade's arm around me, both of us gasping like we'd surfaced from being held underwater too long. The dead circle around us looked different — the withered trees still gray, still stripped bare, but the wrongness that had hung in the air on our way in had lifted, replaced by an exhausted, uncertain quiet."Kade." My voice came out cracked. "Kade, are you—""I'm here." He pulled me closer, checking me over with the same frantic urgency from the courtyard after the attack. "Are you hurt? Do you remember everything, or did it take—""I remember everything," I said, and found, testing the thought carefully, that it was true — the doubt I'd offered up was gone, genuinely gone, a clean absence where uncertainty used to live, but the memories themselves, the months of watching him become someone capable of choosing me, remained intact. "I think it took exactly what I offered. Nothing more."Relief broke across his face, raw and total, and for a
Last Updated : 2026-07-22
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