I cursed under my breath, called out in a way I never thought I would be. I really needed to get those mind barriers in place, stat. “Can’t fault a girl for her fantasies.”
Her mouth pressed against mine and left it so quickly I nearly didn’t register it. “Guess I can’t, but when we’re together, it’s only me you’ll be thinking about, V. That’s a promise Icanmake.”
I might’ve said I was ready, but with my face on fire and heart pounding, I realized very quickly I wasn’t at all. Jo was a whole new beast.
Chapter 13
Pieces of My Soul
Jo
Amagical bond wasn’t complicated. It only required one item to act as a binding host in the interim, while our magic was weaving together to form the connection.
I never thought I’d be open to anything like this after Reyna. A relationship, maybe, but not a bond. Only, the appeal of locking out chaos magic from both of us was too tempting. I’d seen what it’d done to others, what it’d done to me. It was much harder to deny the urge once we’d gotten a taste.
Chaos magic was what started all of this. The reason I lost Reyna. The reason I lost my mother, long before the Nether Royals killed her and sent the rest of us into hiding. The reason our realm feared our kind and set out to burn every single one of us at the stake.
Despite chaos magic being avoidable, it was suggested that once we had a taste, we couldn’t be recovered. Absolute bullshit, but it was the entire reason we were nearly hunted out of existence.
The thing was, the prissy bitch was right to be afraid of it affecting V. Chaos magic was dangerous, especially for someone as young and new to magic as her. It consumed the ones who relied on it. It’d be easier to keep her away from it entirely rather than deal with it after she’d already gotten a taste.
When Reyna and I defected to the human realm, it was with the promise to never use it again, not even when our lives were at risk. Thankfully, my shadow magic didn’t rely on chaos to work, but everything else I was taught did. I had to relearn how to fight and use magic, and that inexperience led to Reyna’s capture, and ultimately, her death.
I wasn’t strong enough to save us both. The humans weren’t powerless like my kind made them out to be. Hunters were uncomfortably lethal even around that time. They knew things about us they shouldn’t.
Humans had been experimenting well before Reyna and I came to that realm. Only in the last couple hundred or so years did they expose their operations to the public, suggesting it wasn’t only humans at the helm of it. My guess was other supernaturals were involved, and that had been made evident by the Seven.
They’d been delving in genetic and magical mutations for far longer than what made sense to their primitive science. Thanks to that fucking nonsense, it took forever to find Reyna again even with our bond. By the time I did, it was too late. The Reyna I knew was too far gone.
Imprisoned the way she was, the chaos magic had consumed her body and mind over the decades. Any longer and it would’ve consumed both her and the realm. At least I’d thought so because power like that couldn’t be contained. Power like that made our kind thirsty and never satisfied. I’d seen it happen with my mother.
In a lucid moment, Reyna pleaded with me to help end her life, to take the pain away, to end her suffering. I was one of few who could, so I did. I gave her the relief and dignity of death. It was all I could do for her after everything the Organization had already subjected her to. Horrors I remembered every time I killed one of theirs.
It might’ve been the poison I offered to her and she quickly consumed to end her life—I couldn’t intentionally kill her with our bond, but I could give her the tool to do it—but it was the Organization who killed Reyna in the end. They’d done to my sweet mate what she always feared; they made her exactly like my mother. Like the fearsome twelve Originals at the end of their reign. All that was left was chaos and darkness when I found her again.
The Originals were as bad as the stories said. The first of our kind. Fae with access to chaos. Fae who could cross realms at will. My mother, Hera, who’d led their group of twelve, was consumed by chaos over the thousands of years she’d used it. Her and the Nether Royals were cut from the same cloth, drunk on power. But Reyna and I hadn’t been corrupted by chaos when the Originals were destroyed in a fight with the Nether Royals and their army.
Or so I thought until Lyra showed the fuck up.
Those of us who survived made it our responsibility to persuade those like us against its use and breed outside our kind so that our potent Royal Siren magic weakened over the generations.
It worked for long enough to get comfortable. Long enough to forget we were being hunted. It’d kept us out of the Nether Royals’ sight until they developed a way to detect even mixed blood. When we lost the ones we’d trained in droves—Fae we’d built communities with and shared history, completely removedfrom the Originals, innocent to their true power—Reyna and I fled the realm.
I never thought I’d come back here. I’d left this part of myself behind centuries ago, but V had a way of changing my perspective on things I’d thought unmovable. Any reason to bind myself to her felt like it was worth whatever future it led to. If I had to be bound by association with the annoying as shit Dark King everyone feared, then so be it.
With her, I didn’t want to be jaded and distant from my heart. I wanted to embrace a new beginning and future. Around her, I was rediscovering the person I’d been with Reyna, and I’d fucking missed it. I’d missed the hope and joy, the laughter and pining. Maybe because I hadn’t been paying attention, but I’d missed it all.
She’d given me back pieces of my soul.
Cassius’s glares were lost on me as our magic slipped out and surrounded the gem between us. All I could focus on was V and how beautiful she was. I’d seen her hellfire and abilities, but I’d never seen her magic produce color. The red mirrored her gorgeous hair. It wove around my multicolored magic. Then the gem caught fire and burned with the power of the two combining.
V's eyes glowed red and rose to meet mine, which were already burning a bright amber. “This tickles,” she whispered under her breath, trying her best not to smile but failing miserably.
I couldn’t help but smile back. “What? Were you hoping for pain instead?”
Her tongue clicked and her soft hand squeezed around mine in punishment as they hovered over the gem. “No, obviously. Just didn’t think I’d be fighting off the urge to giggle while we did this.”
Cassius cleared his throat, his scowl aimed solely at me. The asshole was painfully transparent when it came to his obsession with V. “Focus. No talking.”
