Page 143 of Somnium

“This wasn’t her fault,” she said. “She did everything right. There was no way for her to know he’d split the power.”

Elias’s jaw worked as he shook his head. “Cadi, she⁠—”

“No,” she interrupted, “promise me you’ll make it right with her. We can’t afford to be at each other’s throats. Not now.”

His eyes skimmed her face, and Cadi held firm, refusing to back down until he dipped his chin.

“I promise,” he agreed, “I will.”

“Thank you,” she said, then pulled his forehead to hers.

Elias ran his hand against her arm, holding her for just a moment in the steam-soaked air before he leaned forward again to shut off the water. Goosebumps erupted over Cadi’s skin as he led her out of the shower and wrapped a soft towel around her body to help her to dry.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

Cadi shook her head, exhaustion beginning to tug at her limbs. “I’m just so tired.”

“Okay,” he said quietly as he walked her to the bed and pulled back the covers. The blankets settled over her with a grounding weight that continued the work of easing the tension that still hummed through her body. Elias crawled in next to her and opened his arms to let her nestle into his side before pulling her the tiniest bit closer.

Cadi pressed her ear to his chest, wanting nothing more than to let herself get lost in the steadiness of his heartbeat.

Thump thump. Thump thump.

It all sounded normal. No strange rhythms, no missed pulses. If she didn’t know any better, she would say everything was exactly as it should be, but she understood now that beneath the constant ebb and flow of each beat lay something unseen. Something delicate and precious, with a beauty known only to her through its twin that lived in her own chest.

She winced when Oneirios’s violating presence uncoiled once more, his shadow determined to eclipse the soft peace of their bond. Acid roiled in her gut as she thought about what it meant to be tied to him in this way. How much of her had he already colonized? Her soul? Her will? Her body? His binding had kept Elias contained for the better part of a decade; she couldn’t even bring herself to consider what sort of sick game he had planned for her now.

A thickness spread through the base of her throat as Elias traced his thumb against her shoulder. It was a small comfort against the growing cascade of fear and hopelessness, but she knew it was all he could offer.

Only once had she ever felt a despair so gaping, so oppressive that she feared she may never be able to lift herself out. Her back shook with buried sobs, though she knew it was pointless to hide them. The instant she felt their bond fully settle into place, she’d known the connection between them had changed. It had become more solid to the point that even if he hadn’t been right next to her, with his body flush against hers, she knew Elias would have felt her sorrow the same way she could now feel the rawness of his pain.

His arms tightened around her and he rested his chin against the top of her head to bring her closer, but he didn’t say anything. He just held her until her heart had wrung itself dry, and the last of her tears had soaked into his skin. As her sobs quieted, a fresh wave of exhaustion swept over her, the kind that only comes from a body and soul so spent from trying to stay afloat that it just can’t bring itself to tread any longer.

The room fell quiet, and her eyelids grew heavier until Elias’s voice drifted through the silence. “I thought I could keep you safe.”

The tightness in her chest cinched, and she tilted her head to look up into his eyes, their depths shining with the beginnings of his own tears.

“None of this would have happened if I had been stronger, if I’d just let you remain a beautiful dream. Maybe he wouldn’t have—” He squeezed his eyes shut against the fracture in his voice. “Now he has his hooks in both of us.”

A fresh surge of dread settled into Cadi’s veins. She had seen him torn, seen him beaten, but she had never seen him fall apart like this. The loss of hope in his voice, the defeat in the way he pressed his head to hers …

“How do we fight this?” she asked, reaching to feel any sense that there was a way through the storm, no matter how hard. She needed that hope and so did he, but he only shook his head and looked back to her as tears began to stream down his cheeks.

“I don’t know, love,” he whispered. “Unless we get that ring, but … we won’t give up. We can’t.”

He twisted to face her and press a fierce kiss to her forehead. She shimmied closer to fill in the space, then tucked her head beneath his chin to let the comforting smell of his skin mix with her senses. Sliding her injured hand to his shoulder, she let her fingers relax against him, though it was a sad substitution for her growing need to cling to him with every ounce of her strength.

Despite the uncertainty and heaviness that threatened to crush them, the flutter in her chest stirred, seeming to wind around her heart and nestle against it the way she nestled against Elias. Every hope or dream she’d ever wandered through, be it waking or asleep, had come back to a clawing hunger for this. For him. For someone to hold her, to want her, to fight for her. Now he was here, and she knew that the entire time, he had been dreaming about her, too.

She pulled back just enough to look into his eyes. He watched her with quiet reverence as a hand smoothed back her curls from her face.

“What is it, love?” he asked.

Tugging her bottom lip between her teeth, she mulled over the words she longed to say, every version of her question sounding more and more outlandish than the next. Finally, she accepted that there was no way to ask it without sounding at least a little bit insane. “Was it really me? In your dreams?”

Elias’s hand stilled, and his brows lifted the tiniest bit before he let out a short breath of laughter. “Yeah, it was. I thought I was losing my mind that night when you walked into The Crow. Either that, or I’d fallen asleep in my office. And when I saw that you were caught up with them—with the Order—even with Sera keeping an eye on you, I don’t think I breathed until the moment she told me you were out.”

Cadi huffed a dry laugh. “And here I thought she’d asked me to hang out because of my winning personality.”