SERAPHINA’S POV
The shock hit so hard that I forgot how to breathe.
For one impossible second, the world narrowed to him.
Lucian.
The man who had once stood beside me when I was at my lowest. The man who had given me a new path, new strength.
The man whose motives I had questioned, doubted, defended, resented, and, in some wounded corner of myself, hated.
‘And if somehow, someway, I ever stand in front of you again… Do not trust me.’
Lucian’s gaze held mine across the lit distance, and there was something in it I could not name.
He started to turn—
“Lucian—stop!”
The command tore out of me before I could think, before I could stop the instinct that surged up from somewhere deeper than thought and sharper than restraint.
Power followed it, slipping into my voice without permission, threading through the sound of his name, shaping it into something not merely heard, but felt.
Across the shimmering barrier of the delay trap, Lucian’s body went rigid.
