Page 29 of Bloodstained
Raducel.
He was already moving toward the door, calm amid the panic, his expression unreadable. He didn’t shout for help. He didn’t look back. The torchlight caught his face as he paused in the archway, and I saw it then, the faint, terrible smile that told me he had been waiting for this.
Ivan was beside me, catching me before I fell. His voice was raw, breaking as he shouted for help. “My life, look at me. Stay with me.”
But my body no longer obeyed. My tongue felt heavy. My throat closed around his name. “Ivan…” I lifted my hand and pointed feebly toward the doorway. “Raducel,” I croaked out.
He gathered me into his arms, his warmth the only thing keeping the darkness at bay. His scent—spice and wild earth—wrapped around me, achingly familiar. I tried to lift a hand, to touch him, to let him know I was still there… that I loved him more than anything else.
But warmth spilled from my lips instead. Ivan caught it with trembling fingers, his eyes red and wet with fury and grief. When he drew his hand back, it was slick with my blood.
I tried to speak, to tell him I loved him, but my voice failed. My mouth opened soundlessly as the world dimmed, and the darkness finally claimed me.
The last thing I saw was his face wild with anguish, streaked with blood and tears.
The last thing I heard was his roar splitting the night, a vow torn from his soul that death itself would not keep us apart.
And then the world went still. The firelight dimmed, the cold deepened, and everything that wasme… my breath, my heartbeat, and my name slipped away into the dark.
But somewhere in that endless silence, I still felt him. Ivan’s grief burned hot enough to sear through death itself. His pain became my tether, pulling me toward something I couldn’t yet understand.
Over five centuries would pass before I opened my eyes again… reborn into another life, another name. But time had never been enough to sever what bound us.
I would always be his. And even now, across lifetimes and the ruin of worlds, we remained what we had always been to each other.
Soul mates.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IVAN
The past. The aftermath.
The world ended when she died in my arms, when I heard my love take her last breath.
I remembered nothing aside from roaring out so loud, so painfully, that my voice split the rafters and extinguished the candles, their smoke choking the air. All I knew for certain was the weight of her body in my arms and the silence that followed.
All my men were dead, their bloody bodies strewn on the stone floor, the castle staff’s screams nothing more than a whisper in my ears.
I carried my wife to our chamber, though my arms no longer felt like my own. The bed took her weight as gently as I did. My mind fractured. I was both within my body and watching from beyond it—some helpless man witnessing the ruin of his own soul.
I traced her lips with my thumb, willing warmth back into them, smearing her blood across her skin. “My beautiful girl,” I rasped. “Open your eyes,Draga mea… my beloved.” I pressed my lips to her brow, whispering every promise I’d ever made toher. That I’d find her again. That I’d tear down heaven and hell to do it.
The silence that followed was not silence at all. It screamed through me, splintering every piece of what I had been.
I lay beside her until dawn, my face buried against the hollow of her throat, clinging to her cooling body as the first light touched the windows. The world moved on, indifferent. But I did not.
I buried her myself. No priest. No rites. No witnesses. She was mine, and I wouldn’t let another soul share in the intimate horror of losing her.
Something inside me split wide open.
I stayed by her grave for days, sleeping on the frozen earth, numb to hunger andthirst. I couldn’t leave her out in the cold. I couldn’t let her be alone.
Time after her death didn’t pass. It bled. Slowly and endlessly, like eternity itself had stopped to watch me break.
When I rose from the grave, I was no longer a man but a hollow thing carved from loss and fury. Night hung heavy, a storm pressing at the horizon. Every breath burned, and every heartbeat reminded me of what had been stolen. Her scent still clung to my skin, and the realization that it would eventually fade split me in two.
One thought drove me: Find the traitor who stole my heart in his hand and crushed it.
