The world is not what you think. Love isn't what it seems to be. Life is a cycle of magic. And Scarlet is the girl who has that magic. Once they called her a halfling, an aberration that shouldn't have existed but now others say she's special.
In a...
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As soon as he spoke these three words I knew. I remembered the vision Sasha had shown me months ago and suddenly, it made perfect sense.
A perverse kind of sense.
There was never a choice. There was no middle ground.
Lucas could give me a soulless existence, or no existence at all, and Regan was going to make us both get blood on our hands and live with that taint.
That choice felt like it was made long before I even knew about it.
Kill one to live and save the other.
I did the only thing I could.
The soulless had to die and if that meant I had to break a piece of my heart and throw it away, then I was going to do that.
Shatter.
Holding his hands with mine, feeling the flow of life that came from him and surged inside me, traveled out to saturate the bonds that connected me to my Apex and my pack, I held onto that brave man who had stayed true to himself till the very end.
My face felt hot, scorching tears saturating the skin as I drew more and more out of him. It was an endless pit of energy I had never felt before, the act something I didn't know how to do until it was time to do it.
Until he commanded me to do it.
Kill him to kill them.
My body shook from the sheer power that flowed through me. I took more and more of it. I kept taking, kept letting that power into the bond, barely listening to the howls of the pack that felt it too, to the cracking of bones close-by, to the shouts that didn't make sense.
The soulless had been screaming for what felt like hours. Those of my packmates who kept their human skin were screaming too.
There was too much power. Filling me. Filling the bond.
I couldn't stop. Not even when I felt the bond quaking, heard it cracking in protest.
It twisted and lashed at me. It heaved under the pressure I exerted on it.
"Scarlet, please!" I heard Regan shout. "You're going to break it!"
I couldn't stop now.
"Scarlet!" So much pain in that voice, his desperation resonating through me with every tide that swept.
I was too afraid to even open my mouth and tell him how sorry I was, but before I could try I heard it.
And I felt it.
Something that was never supposed to happen. Something that was nothing but a tale in our world.
The bond broke.
I was cut.
Both from my mate and my pack.
The hands against mine lost their substance. The man in front of me crumbled into small pieces like a body made of sand that dispersed with the tide and sunk back into the shore.
