Back in the ballroom, Yuvaan checked the time again. The music felt distant, the lights too bright, the atmosphere suddenly wrong.
Kiara had been gone too long.
His fingers tightened around the rim of his glass. A faint unease slithered through him—sharp, cold, instinctive.
Where are you, Kiara?
And then it happened.
A voice. Soft, trembling, carried as if through layers of walls and smoke—
"Yuvaan…"
His heart stopped.
Every muscle in his body went still.
He wasn't imagining it. He knew her voice.
"Yuvaan… please…"
A jolt ran through him like an electric shock. He dropped the glass, the shattering lost under the noise of the party as he pushed through the crowd, trying to trace the direction of her desperate cry.
His breath grew ragged, panic rising under his skin. He moved faster, following that faint pull inside him, the one that had always drawn him to her without explanation.
I'm coming, Kiara… hold on.
---
The Burning Room
The fire roared louder.
Kiara's eyelids fluttered heavily, smoke invading her lungs, making it impossible to breathe. Her head swayed weakly, vision doubling.
"Yuvaan…" she murmured one last time before her strength drained.
And then—
The door exploded inward.
Yuvaan stood framed in the doorway, eyes burning a deep, unnatural red. When he saw her—tied to the chair, flames curling around her like hungry serpents—his heart tore inside him.
"Kiara!"
She managed a faint smile at the sight of him… and then her body went limp.
That was all it took.
The world around Yuvaan disappeared. The fire didn't frighten him—it parted for him.
He walked straight through the flames as if they were nothing. Heat licked his skin, sparks clawed at his clothes, but he didn't stop—not for a heartbeat.
He reached her, dropped to his knees, and sliced the ropes with his nails, sharp and glowing from rage.
"Kiara… stay with me," he whispered, voice breaking.
He lifted her into his arms, holding her as if she were made of something fragile and irreplaceable.
Behind him, the flames that had raged seconds ago suddenly bent backward—then died out completely, leaving only smoke trailing into silence.
---
The Field
Yuvaan rushed her outside to the open field behind the college, laying her gently on a wooden bench.
Her eyes were closed. Her breathing shallow. Her lips pale.
"Kiara… Kiara, look at me," he pleaded, tapping her cheek lightly.
No response.
His chest tightened with fear.
He leaned closer—she wasn't breathing properly.
Panic punched through him.
Without a second thought, he tilted her head back, sealed his mouth over hers, and gave her air—slow, steady breaths.
Again.
And again.
"Come on… please… don't do this to me," he whispered, voice trembling.
Then—
A faint gasp.
Kiara's chest rose.
Her eyes fluttered open, disoriented, confused, but alive.
Yuvaan let out a breath that trembled with relief before pulling her into a fierce embrace.
"Don't ever… ever scare me like that again," he said, voice cracking for the first time in years. "I thought I lost you. I can't lose you, Kiara. Not you."
She clung to him weakly, her cheek against his chest.
"Yuvaan… you found me."
"I will always find you."
He cupped her face with shaking hands. "After my mother… you are the second most important person in my life. And I didn't realize how much until tonight."
Kiara blinked up at him, tears gathering.
"You… you mean that?"
He nodded, forehead touching hers.
"I love you," he whispered, raw and sincere. "I love you so damn much."
Kiara's breath hitched.
"I love you too."
The confession settled between them like the softest, warmest truth.
Yuvaan leaned in—hesitant for a fraction of a second—until Kiara closed the distance. Their lips met in a deep, passionate kiss, slow and desperate, the kind born from fear, longing, and the realization of what they almost lost.
He held her close, as if promising she'd never face danger alone again.
And for the first time, the night felt calm.
In the shattered expanse of Kaal Vansh, night had always been thick with whispers of ancient sins… but tonight, it turned violent.
Winds tore across the barren plains as if awakened by a force older than prophecy itself. The sky cracked open with red lightning, thunder rolling like the roar of a wounded god.
Inside her obsidian chamber, Taamsi, the Shadow Witch who had long observed the fates of Kiara and Yuvaan, went still.
Her eyes snapped open.
Her powers—finely tuned to detect disturbances in the balance of light and shadow—shivered violently.
The runes carved into her skin glowed. The air around her trembled.
"No…" she breathed. "This storm isn't natural."
She stepped forward, palm hovering over her swirling smoke-mirror. A violent surge pushed back against her—something it had never done before.
"Who has tampered with destiny tonight?" she whispered.
She reached deeper, trying to read the threads of fate.
For years she had watched Yuvaan—the reborn Kaal—and Kiara—the reeva bloodline. She knew them. She knew their paths. She knew the prophecy that tied their bloodlines.
But what she saw now…
It made no sense.
The storm's epicenter…
It was not a ritual. Not a death. Not a curse.
It was something far more delicate.
A union.
A merging of energies that should have never overlapped.
Taamsi gasped.
"No. There was no foretold merging tonight. No spell… no awakening… so what triggered this?"
The storm intensified, shaking her chamber, tossing her crystal goblets to the floor. Her smoke mirrors flickered like dying fireflies.
She steadied herself.
"Someone has touched a line they weren't meant to cross."
She sifted through the threads of destiny again—trying to find the name, the event, the moment.
Kiara's thread pulsed.
Yuvaan's thread pulsed.
But they pulsed separately—nothing in her vision showed them crossing.
"That cannot be," Taamsi muttered. "Their energies were never meant to merge. They are opposites. They cannot bind. They are not written to—"
Another blast of wind tore through the chamber.
Taamsi staggered, clutching the stone pillar.
"What union caused this storm?"
Her voice trembled.
"Who has awakened a force that doesn't exist in prophecy?"
The storm shrieked across Kaal Vansh, as if mocking her confusion.
Because the cause of the chaos…
Was not in her realm.
Not in her visions.
It was happening in the human world where Kiara and Yuvaan kissed, completely unaware that the simple, pure act was rewriting the laws Taamsi lived by.
And Taamsi—powerful, ancient, feared—
had no idea that the forbidden storm was born from the two souls she thought she understood.