Elara
She felt him before she saw him.
The bond tightened—not sharp, not panicked like before, but deliberate. As if someone had wrapped their fingers around a thread tied straight through her spine and pulled once. Hard enough to demand attention. Not enough to break her.
Elara stood very still at the edge of the ravine, dawn leaking slowly into the world like a bruise turning yellow. Cold stone pressed through the thin soles of her boots. Behind her, Malrik's presence was a quiet certainty—close enough to anchor, far enough not to cage.
That mattered. No
After everything that had happened in the night—after the blood, the hunt, the almost-kiss that hadn't been—space felt like mercy.
"Step away from her."
Draven's voice cut through the ravine, raw and restrained and shaking with violence he was barely holding back.
Elara closed her eyes.
