"What mark?" Leo asked, though something in his expression suggested he already feared the answer.
Aerin reached up to touch the side of his neck, her fingers tracing a pattern that was invisible to normal sight but blazed with significance to her enhanced fae vision. "Mordaine's binding mark. She transferred the Mistbound's corruption into your family's mating bonds to keep it from spreading to your bloodline directly."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Meaning every time a Maddox descendant forms a true mating bond, they risk activating the mark and releasing centuries of accumulated corruption." Aerin's voice shook. "Meaning our connection isn't just potentially manipulated—it's potentially lethal."
Leo's arms tightened around her, he responded to the threat with protective fury. "And the only way to prevent that?"
"Break the ancient curse by cleansing the corruption from the mark before it can activate," Aerin said, her mind racing through possibilities even as her heart ached at the cruel irony. "Which probably requires the kind of perfect magical harmony between our bloodlines that would trigger the very activation we're trying to prevent."
Around them, the festival continued with forced cheer as Elder Ruth and the other council members tried to minimize the drama of Aerin's public vision. But Leo's enhanced senses detected the subtle changes in the crowd's mood, the way conversations had shifted toward speculation about what the visiting researcher had seen during the blessing ceremony.
"So we're trapped in the same paradox that destroyed Mordaine and Kieran," Leo said grimly. "We need to trust each other completely to break the curse, but trusting each other completely is what triggers the curse in the first place."
"Unless we can find another way," Aerin said, her determination crystallizing as she met his concerned gaze. "Unless we figure out how to cleanse the corruption without forming a full mating bond."
"And if we can't?"
"Then we make the same choice Mordaine made," Aerin said quietly. "We sacrifice our happiness to protect everyone else from the consequences of our connection."
Leo was quiet for a moment, processing implications that added personal stakes to what had already been a crisis of supernatural proportions. Finally, he spoke with the conviction.
"No," he said firmly. "We find another way. We break the curse without repeating their mistakes. Because I refuse to believe that love is supposed to be a weapon instead of a strength."
As they stood together in the middle of the festival crowd, surrounded by celebration but isolated by the weight of inherited curses and impossible choices, Aerin felt something shift in her understanding of their situation. The connection between them wasn't just attraction or manipulation—it was the key to breaking a cycle of betrayal and sacrifice that had been repeating for centuries.
The question was whether they were strong enough to rewrite the ending, or whether they were destined to become just another tragedy in the founder families' long history of love corrupted by magic and duty.
Either way, Aerin was beginning to understand that her feelings for Leo went far beyond academic curiosity or supernatural manipulation. Whatever the risks, whatever the consequences, she was falling in love with a man whose very existence carried the seeds of potential destruction.
And somehow, she was going to have to figure out how to save them both.
NINE
LEO
The nightmares started the night after the festival, rippling through Mistwhisper Falls like a supernatural contagion. By dawn, Sheriff Torres had fielded seventeen calls about disturbing dreams involving ancient bindings, betrayal, and something vast and hungry stirring beneath the earth. Every supernatural resident in town had experienced variations of the same vision—darkness rising from beneath Hush Falls, reaching out with tendrils that turned love into corruption and trust into weapons.
Aerin hadn't slept at all. She'd spent the night in the inn's library, surrounded by detection equipment that painted increasingly alarming pictures of magical instability. The betrayal rune's interaction with the primary seal wasn't creating the harmonious cleansing effect she'd hoped for—instead, it was destabilizing both systems, creating feedback loops that threatened to tear apart the entire founder network.
"The resonance patterns are getting worse," she announced when Leo arrived for his morning supervisory duties, his appearance suggesting he'd gotten about as much sleep as she had. "Whatever activated during the festival triggered a cascade response that's spreading beyond Mistwhisper Falls."
Leo moved to examine the data displays, his lion's senses immediately picking up the scent of magical overload that clung to Aerin's equipment. "How bad?"
"Salem's seal collapsed completely at three AM. Seattle reported critical instability warnings an hour ago. New Orleans is experiencing the same nightmare phenomena we're seeing here." Aerin's voice carried the brittle precision of someone holding panic at bay through sheer force of professional focus. "We're not just looking at local containment failure anymore—we're looking at continental cascade collapse."
The weight of that revelation settled over the library like a physical presence. Leo felt his protective instincts surge as he processed the implications of supernatural catastrophe on such a massive scale, while his analytical mind began calculating response strategies for threats that extended far beyond anything he'd trained to handle.
"How long do we have?" he asked, settling into the chair beside her workstation despite the way proximity made his lion pace restlessly.
"At current degradation rates? Maybe forty-eight hours before the primary seal fails completely. After that, every remaining founder site will collapse within days." Aerin's hands trembled slightly as she pulled up projections that painted an increasingly dire picture. "Leo, we're not just talking about the Mistbound breaking free. We're talking about the release of every entity the founders bound across the entire continental network."
"Entities plural?"
"The founder network wasn't just about containing one ancient being—it was about containing pieces of something much larger that had been scattered across the continent." Aerin's voice dropped to a whisper as she shared discoveries that recontextualized everything they thought they understood."The Mistbound isn't the primary threat. It's just one fragment of something that the original magical communities couldn't destroy, only dismember and contain."
Leo felt his blood chill as the scope of the crisis became clear. "And if all the fragments are released simultaneously?"
