Page 170 of His Darkest Desire

His arms trembled with strain as he brought his hands together, focusing on that attunement, on the arcane path the stones had forged between worlds when Vex had unlocked the power of Kinsley’s blood. He bent all his willpower toward it.

“The door is unlocked,” he rasped. “Open the way.”

The air shuddered around him. Fire sparked in his veins, accompanying the arcing magic, searing him from within.

“Open to me!”

The power swelled and swept forward, but it halted before ever leaving his body. Something caught it—a net woven of magic so ancient that it had existed before time, that it had been spun from the very fabric of creation itself.

Vex’s soul trembled. He knew that arcane net; it was as familiar to him as his own hands. The queen’s curse. It stretched against the magic’s force, but only slightly.

“Open,” Vex repeated, voice raw. “Open to me!”

The curse solidified. Vex leaned into it, driving more and more magic at the arcane barrier, pouring all the strength of his mind, body, and spirit into it, but the net began to contract all the same. It drew in on him, reversing the flow of magic.

Pain wracked his body as his muscles locked. “Open…”

No, no, no! Not now, not again! No!

Green energies burst from the standing stones, and a wave of power crashed over Vex. It blinded him, deafened him, numbed him, crushed him. Scalding heat swept through his body, blazing down into his bones. And the curse, that cruelest of gifts from the cruelest of queens, cinched tight around Vex’s heart.

All at once, the magic dissipated.

Vex staggered and sucked in a harsh breath. Echoes of agony pulsed through him, a stinging, burning, permeating ache, but it did not compare to the cold, icy grip on his heart.

He’d endured such agony hundreds of times in his attempts to cross over, many of those occurrences just over the past seven months. But this time…

He fell onto his knees, barely feeling the jolt of the impact, and roared. All his suffering, all his helplessness, and all his longing emerged in the sound, which became broken and hoarse as he collapsed.

Forehead to the ground, he clawed at the moss and earth beneath him. Clawed at it and wept. He’d cursed the queen for dooming his mate, but this was his doing. This was his choice. And despite it, Kinsley had held on. She’d endured. She’d remained.

But he’d lost her anyway. Just when soon had been its closest, he’d lost her, and he could do nothing to find her, nothing to help her, nothing but love her from so damned far away and hope she and their child were safe.

The tears falling from his eyes were hotter than the curse’s grasp, but there was nothing to dam their flow.

A flicker of magic brushed against Vex’s senses when the wisps came to him. With gentle touches and soft voices, they soothed him, comforted him, supported him, just as they had for untold years. Yet in that moment, he was a broken creature. Naught could assuage his agony. His mate, his life, was beyond the barrier, and he could not get through. His love was not enough to tear down the wall.

Vex pressed his forehead against the ground as tears dripped off his nose. “Kinsley…”

Whatever strength had remained in him drained slowly, and he sagged down, wings falling over him limply.

That huge, consuming ache in his heart overpowered all else. He’d failed her. Failed them. He had succumbed to despair in two days, after his mate had kept faith, had clung to hope, for months.

Something stirred. Not Vex, not the wisps, not the standing stones or the tree. Something beyond all that but somehow part of everything, something unfathomably immense but infinitely delicate and tiny, something woven into all existence and wrapped around it.

A shiver stole through Vex. The movement of that barely perceivable, incomprehensible force rippled into him. If it was magic, it was unlike any he’d ever felt. It was terrible yet comforting, ominous yet filled with promise.

The curse’s venom seeped into his veins as though in response, spreading fire through him. The cords of that net sizzled inside him, drawing tight, coiling like a serpent. He exhaled.

Vex’s chest seized. His heart stopped, and his lungs refused to draw breath. The wisps’ frantic, concerned voices washed over him, their words lost to his understanding. He scarcely felt their touches as that stirring within the fabric of creation intensified and radiated into him.

The pain receded against a slow, refreshing tide. The threads of the curse, the links of the chains the queen had forged out of pride, greed, and spite so long ago, unraveled as that force engulfed them.

Vex’s heart thumped. He sucked in a sudden, shuddering breath and pushed himself up on trembling arms.

With the same unhurried inevitability with which it had come, that force faded into the ether. Silence spread in its wake—the sort of silence that came only when a sound one had heard ceaselessly for as long as could be remembered suddenly fell quiet.

Fate.

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