The cathedral was a ruin of stone and silence. Its stained-glass windows had long since shattered, leaving jagged teeth of color that caught the moonlight in fractured shards. Ezzy stepped inside, her boots crunching over broken tile, the shard in her chest thrumming with anticipation.
He was already there.
Caspian stood at the altar, a silhouette of shadow against the pale light. His presence pressed against her mind the moment she entered, cold and sharp, but not as overwhelming as before. He was weaker. She could feel it.
"You've been pulling me like a dog on a chain," he said, his voice low, threaded with both fury and something else — curiosity. "Do you even understand what you're doing?"
Ezzy's laugh was brittle. "For once, yes. I'm not your puppet anymore."
The shard pulsed, and she felt his hunger ripple through her, a gnawing ache that wasn't hers. She forced it down, stepping closer. "You put this inside me. Now you're going to tell me how to get it out."
Caspian's eyes glinted, silver swallowed by black. "If I could take it back, I would. But it's not that simple. The shard is alive now. It's feeding on you, and through you, on me. Sever it, and we both die."
Ezzy froze. "You're lying."
He shook his head. "No. I've carried pieces of others before. I know the bond. This one is different. It's not just tethered — it's fused. You've become my anchor."
The words sank into her like ice. She wanted to scream, to deny it, but the shard pulsed in agreement. She could feel the truth of it in her bones.
"Then what?" she demanded. "I just live like this? Half-me, half-you, until I burn out?"
Caspian's expression shifted, a flicker of something almost human. "Or you learn to wield it. To wield us."
Ezzy's breath caught. For a moment, she saw him not as a predator but as something else — a man bound by hunger, by centuries of survival, by choices that had left him hollow. And through the bond, she glimpsed flashes of his past: a city in flames, a betrayal by someone he once trusted, the first time he stole aura to keep from vanishing into nothing.
He stepped closer, his voice softer now. "I'm dying, Ezzy. Without that shard, I unravel. With it, you unravel. The only way forward is together."
Her fists clenched. "Or I find another way."
Caspian's smile was thin, almost sad. "Then you'd better find it fast. Because Selene won't wait. She'll come for you, and when she does, she won't just take the shard. She'll take everything."
The shard inside Ezzy flared, as if in warning. She felt Selene's fractured aura echoing faintly in the distance, drawing closer.
Ezzy met Caspian's gaze, her voice steady despite the storm inside her. "Fine. One last fight. Against her. After that, I decide what happens to us."
Caspian inclined his head, a shadow of respect in the gesture. "A bargain, then."
The cathedral groaned in the night wind, its broken windows whispering like ghosts. Ezzy tightened her grip on her bag, her heart pounding. She didn't trust him. She didn't trust herself. But for now, she had no choice.
The bond between them pulsed, not as a wound, but as a pact.
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