A flicker crosses Adrial's face—like he just heard something I couldn't. His eyes shift slightly, unfocused, as if listening to a voice only he can hear. The moment stretches, quiet and strange, before his expression hardens again.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
I pull back just enough to look at him, confused.
We had just—he had just—his mouth was on mine, his body pinning me to the wall, his voice wrecked with the admission that he couldn't let me go. We had finally broken through the walls he'd built, finally said the things we'd been terrified to name. And now he was apologizing?
"For what?" I whisper, searching his face. "Adrial, what—"
But his expression has already shifted, something closing behind his eyes that I can't reach.
"Adrial, for what?" My voice rises, thin and sharp. I grip his wrists, trying to pull his hands back into focus, but he's already drifting somewhere I can't follow. "What do you mean, you're sorry? What—"
His hands stay on my face, thumbs brushing my cheeks. His voice drops, low and steady.
"The mark is what drew them to you," he says. "It is a beacon. Once it's gone, they'll have nothing to follow. You'll be invisible to them. Safe." His jaw tightens. "I'll make sure of it."
"Adrial, don't—"
Then his palm flattens over the mark on my chest.
The cold hits like a blade.
It isn't the absence of heat. It's the absence of him—something alive and breathing torn out by the roots. I scream, the sound tearing my throat raw, as the mark ignites in agony. White-hot. Then freezing. Then nothing.
My body goes rigid, my knees buckling—his hands still on my shoulders, holding me up even as he tears himself away. I can feel it, I can feel him leaving, can see it in his eyes already somewhere else—
The shadows shriek. Not around us—from us, from the space between our bodies where something is ripping apart. They collapse inward, devouring themselves, and I feel the moment the bond severs like a cord snapped underwater, a pressure release so violent my vision whites out.
When I can see again, I'm on my knees.
My fingers claw at my chest, nails digging into skin that feels wrong. The mark is still there, but barely. Not alive anymore. Not his.
Just silence. Absolute and suffocating.
I look up. Adrial is standing over me, his face pale, his own chest heaving like he's been gutted too. The shadows are gone from him. All of them. His wings, those terrible, beautiful wings, have vanished with the bond. He looks almost human in the harsh motel light, and somehow that's the cruelest thing of all.
"Adrial?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too high. Too broken.
He doesn't touch me. Doesn't reach down to help me up. Just looks at me like he's already a thousand miles away.
"I had to," he whispers, and his voice cracks on the words, "Before I destroyed you."
Then he steps back.
And he's gone.
Not faded. Not walked out the door. Gone. The air where he stood feels colder, emptier, like a tooth pulled from a socket. I stare at the space, waiting for the shadows to surge back, for him to reappear with that half-smile and tell me it was a test, a lesson, anything—
A single black feather drifts down, spiraling slowly through the empty air. It lands on the carpet between us, soft and impossible, the only proof he was ever here at all.
I lunge for it. My fingers close around the quill, clutching it to my chest, and the sob that rips out of me is ugly, desperate, animal. I curl around the feather, pressing it against my sternum where the mark used to burn, and I cry until my throat is raw, until my body shakes with the force of it, until the feather is damp with tears and my hands won't stop trembling.
I don't let go.
When the worst of it passes, when I can breathe again in broken gasps, I finally look down at my chest. The mark is still there—but wrong. The deep crimson has faded to a pale, ghostly pink, barely visible against my skin. A scar. A memory. No warmth, no pulse, no living connection. Just a shadow of what it was, as dormant and distant as he is.
I press my fingers to it anyway, willing it to respond, to flare, to anything—
Nothing.
I tuck the feather carefully into my bag. The only piece of him I have left. The only anchor to something I can no longer feel.
The room stays empty. The shadows stay gone. The silence keeps getting louder.
I try to breathe. My chest won't expand properly. There's something wrong with my lungs, with my heart, with everything. I press both hands to my sternum and dig my nails in until I feel pain, real pain, because maybe if I hurt enough, I'll remember how to feel anything else.
It doesn't work.
I stay on my knees. The carpet smells like mildew and old smoke and something else—him, faint and fading, already disappearing. I breathe it in anyway, greedy and desperate, until my lungs burn and my throat closes and the sobs finally hit.
They come from somewhere deeper than crying should reach. From my stomach, from my spine, from the hollow place where the mark used to live. I curl forward until my forehead presses the floor, my arms wrapped around myself like I can hold something in, like I can keep the last pieces of him from leaking out through my skin.
This was supposed to be different.
The thought repeats, jagged and useless. This was supposed to be different. He kissed me. He said he couldn't let me go. I told him I was falling for him, and he didn't pull away, he didn't—
He did.
He did pull away. He did let me go. He tore himself out of me like I was nothing, like the bond was nothing, like I was nothing he couldn't survive losing.
I was wrong.
The words don't form properly in my head. Just fragments. Wrong. So wrong. Wrong wrong wrong—
I press my palm harder against my chest, grinding bone against bone, willing the mark back into existence by force of want alone. My breath comes in short, panicked gasps that don't fill my lungs. For one desperate second, I almost convince myself I feel something—a flicker, a ghost, a memory of heat—
Nothing.
I don't know how long I stay on the floor. Time stretches and contracts, meaningless. My throat is raw from sounds I don't remember making. My eyes burn and swell until I can't see properly, until the cheap carpet blurs into brown and gray and nothing. My body feels too heavy and too light at once, like gravity has stopped working properly, like I'm falling in every direction at once.
I reach for him again. In my mind. In the space where the bond used to be. In the dark corners of the room where shadows should gather.
There's nothing. No echo. No whisper. Not even the cold certainty of his absence—just absence, complete and indifferent, like he was never real at all.
Maybe he wasn't. Maybe I imagined everything. Maybe I'm still in the cellar, still holding Grace's hand, still desperate enough to summon something that was never—
No.
No, I felt him. I feel him still, somewhere beneath the numbness, a phantom ache where my body remembers what my mind can't accept. The bond is gone, but the scar still burns with the memory of it, ghost fire under my skin, and I don't know if that's better or worse than the empty.
I don't know anything.
Exhaustion finally drags me under like a tide, and I don't have the strength to fight it. I curl tighter into myself, cheek pressed to the carpet, and let the darkness take me.
When I wake, sunlight is leaking through the cheap curtains in thin, ugly stripes.
For a few disoriented seconds, I think it was all a nightmare. The severance, the empty, the gone—just a bad dream, and if I roll over he'll be there, shadows coiled around him, eyes already open and waiting for mine—
I roll over.
The other side of the bed is untouched. The sheets are smooth, cold, exactly as they were when we arrived. No indentation. No warmth. No smell of smoke and something darker, just the faint chemical staleness of cheap motel detergent.
I press my hand to my chest anyway.
The scar is smooth beneath my fingers. Cold. Empty.
It wasn't a dream.
The thought lands like a physical blow. I sit up too fast, my head spinning, my stomach lurching. My eyes are swollen shut enough that I have to pry them open with my fingers. My throat feels like I've swallowed glass. The clock on the nightstand reads 8:17 a.m., and I don't know if that's been hours or minutes or days.
I'm still in North Dakota.
I have no idea how to get home.
My hands shake so badly I can barely grip my phone. I stare at the screen, waiting for something—anything—a message, a missed call, a notification from a number I don't recognize. Nothing. I check again. Again. My thumb hovers over his name in my contacts, except I never had his number, never had anything real, just shadows and promises and a mark that's gone.
Thirty-seven dollars in cash. A debit card with maybe a couple of hundred more. The bus station a few blocks away. I book the ticket without thinking, my fingers clumsy, my eyes blurring. Forty minutes. Hours and transfers back.
I don't let myself think about what happens after. I just move.
The walk to the station is too bright, too loud. Every car that passes makes me flinch. Every shadow makes my chest ache with false hope. I keep my head down, my hood pulled up, my arms wrapped around myself like I can hold the pieces together.
The bus is half-empty and smells like old vinyl and stale coffee and something else—despair, maybe, or just my own skin, sour with sweat and grief. I take a window seat near the back and press my forehead to the cool glass. My reflection is a stranger. Swollen eyes, splotchy skin, a mouth that looks like it's forgotten how to shape anything but pain.
I turn my face away.
The landscape rolls past in muted colors—flat fields, scattered trees, the occasional distant farmhouse. Everything looks dead or dying. I keep checking my phone even though I know, know, there won't be anything. The battery drops from 67% to 43% to 19% from checking and checking and checking.
The motion of the bus makes me nauseous. I swallow it down. I don't have the energy to be sick.
Everything feels dull. Distant. Like I'm watching my own life through fogged glass.
The hum of the tires should be soothing. It isn't. It's just noise, filling the silence where something else used to be. I keep reaching for the mark out of habit, pressing my fingers to my chest, expecting heat or pulse or him—
Smooth scar. Cold skin. Empty.
He's gone.
Not just gone. Erased. The bond severed so completely it's like it never existed. The shadows that hovered at the edges of my vision, the constant low hum of his presence, the certainty that somewhere he was there—all of it, gone. The quiet is so complete it feels like dying. Like I've been buried alive in my own body and no one can hear me screaming.
I don't cry on the bus. I'm too tired. The tears dried up somewhere between North Dakota and nowhere, but the ache remains, heavy and constant, a weight pressing down on my chest that won't lift no matter how deep I breathe.
I rest my head against the window and let the vibration of the glass lull me into a numb half-sleep. In the dark behind my eyelids, I see him—his face in the moment before he severed us, the flicker of something that looked like pain, like regret, like love—
Then I wake up and remember it doesn't matter what he felt.
He's gone.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do now.
I don't know who I am without the mark.
Without him.
The bus keeps moving, carrying me back to a life that suddenly feels too small, too ordinary, too empty.
I have no idea what comes next.