ELARA POV
The hole in my chest should have killed me.
I could feel it—the wound where the Firstborn had driven Malachar's hand through my ribs, piercing lung and heart and everything vital. Blood and golden light leaked from it with each breath, each heartbeat growing weaker.
I was dying.
But I wasn't dead yet.
And in that space between living and dying, I understood something I should have seen earlier.
The bond with Kael—the incomplete, imperfect connection we'd been building—wasn't incomplete anymore.
It had finished itself.
Not through ritual or ceremony or careful magical alignment. But through choice. Through desperation. Through him diving into my mind to save me from the cage, and me teleporting across a battlefield to save him from his possessed brother.
Through us choosing each other, again and again, in moments when we should have chosen survival instead.
