Chapter 438: Rid You Of Them

Elien;

Lightness...

A... difference in weight. That’s the first thing I feel, the first thing I notice...How...light I feel.

It’s not the cold stone beneath me—damp and rough where my knees have scraped raw against it, or the smell of burned incense still hanging in the chamber. No. The first thing I notice is the lightness.

The kind you feel when you’re so...empty you don’t know what to do with yourself. The kind of...lightness that almost feels like a trance...?

Then I notice the silence.

For months, there has always been someone else in here with me. A voice threading through my thoughts before I’ve even finished forming them. A presence pressed so close against my own that I stopped remembering what it felt like to be one person occupying this body alone.

Now...It feels strange...Empty in a way I never knew was possible to feel.

I know I lived my life before Elian appeared...But I guess you can only miss what you’ve had. Now that I know what it feels like to have him with me...I—I can’t go back to living without him.

The symbols and light die around me, and I look up at the black orb now in the hands of one of the cloaked creatures.

There’s a tiny spot of light inside the orb now, and my heart sinks as my vision blurs. Elian... They’ve trapped him... in an orb. That’s not right.

He...he needs a body. He needs me.

He won’t be able to smell, or...or see, or...taste or feel in there. That’s not right. He needs me. He can’t...

I try to reach out...To reach for him, but my body’s weak. It doesn’t answer.

My hand goes to my chest. Clutching over my heart as I try to process how truly empty I feel without him here.

There’s nothing. No frightened whisper asking me to explain what’s coming... No impulsive burst of panic I have to talk down before it gets us both killed... No warmth curling quietly at the edges of my mind, letting me know, without ever needing words for it—that I wasn’t facing whatever came next by myself.

Now, it’s just quiet...

I don’t know what to do with silence. I have forgotten, somewhere along the way, I have forgotten how to sit inside my own head without another voice answering my every question and thought.

I push myself upright slowly, testing my weight, and the room blurs around me. Whatever they did to tear Elián out of me left its mark here too, not just inside my chest... The stone and walls themselves look wounded.

My throat feels scraped hollow. Everything seems too bright, too loud, and too real all of a sudden.

Yes, sometimes I took control of our body, but Elian was always the anchor for months now. He was mostly in charge. Now that I have to take control of my body, I...I don’t want to. Especially not without him here.

Then I hear footsteps. My entire body locks up, because I do not need to look before I know who they belong to.

I’ve known the particular weight of that walk for longer than I want to remember. Those unhurried, calculated steps. Patient in a way that has always frightened me more than urgency ever could.

The walk of a man who has never once in his life questioned whether a room, or the person kneeling in it, belonged to him before claiming them.

I don’t turn my head. I don’t give him the satisfaction of watching me brace, because I know what is coming. We both do.

The smack comes without warning.

It lands hard across my cheek, snapping my head in the opposite direction with enough force that dots bounce on my vision, and pain shoots through my whole face, jaw, and skull. My teeth catch my tongue somewhere in the middle of it, and I taste copper immediately. Thick, warm, and pooling at the corner of my mouth.

I don’t react. I don’t whimper or cry out.

I’ve had years of practice not giving him that, years of learning exactly how much of myself I’m allowed to let show and exactly how much has to stay locked somewhere he can’t reach.

I lift my head back slowly to meet his eyes, and whatever he sees on my face makes something in his expression sharpen into open delight.

"Yes," He breathes, almost reverently, like a man greeting something he’d feared lost forever. "There he is. My Elien."

I say nothing. I let the silence sit between us, because I have nothing to say to him. I’ve never had anything to say to him, and I don’t intend to change that.

When we woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to somehow wind up back with him. Elian’s plan was risky. But I trusted it. I trusted our powers; I trusted his faith in our joint strength. But now that we’ve been pulled apart, everything has collapsed.

The Alphas don’t know where we are. Elian is in an orb now, and...And I’m back with Balinar. In a matter of minutes, everything we’ve spent months building and owning has fallen apart. And what kills me...is the fact that...I see no redemption in sight.

Am I really going to return with this monster? Am I really going to lose the little bits of happiness Elian helped me acquire over the months? Am I going to return to that room??

Is this what my life will return to? Being broken by Balinar bit by bit till I...I have nothing left to hold onto??

Balinar looks at me, and I can tell he sees exactly how little that strike accomplished.

"I’m glad you’re back where you belong," he breathes, crouching now to bring himself to my eye level. The way you’d crouch to address something small and disobedient...something that needed correcting.

"But you understand you have to be punished. For leaving in the first place... For letting those Ashfang mongrels put their hands on what’s mine."

I look away from him as a certain heaviness fills my heart at his words.

The truth is...Before Elian, before the Ashfang brothers bought us....I only ever loved Lioran. But...In the months I spent with the brothers...another truth surfaced.

Elian isn’t the only one who loves the rest of the brothers. At first, I tried to deny it...but it’s true. At first I thought what I felt were just Elian’s emotions bleeding into mine, but the fact that I can still feel them after he’s been ripped away...

I realise the pathetic truth of it.

From the shadows...I started loving them too. Koda’s loyalty. His heart. The strength that he was always willing to share, and the way he protected us... Cared for us. And Zephan...he never looked at us like we were fragile and useless. The way he...treated us like we had the right to occupy our own space. The room he gave us to just exist. The way his love was never suffocating. And Zethar. The stubborn fool. His declarations of love in quiet gestures.

I love them too...I do.

Hence, going back with Balinar isn’t truly the only thing that hurts me...Losing them...that hurts too. That hurts more.

Balinar suddenly grabs my wrist, and I’m pulled back to the grim reality surrounding me.

He turns my wrist over before I can pull it away, and I freeze as his thumb drags harshly across the mark around my wrist. Zephan’s mark.

I feel something twist wrong in my chest even before he says a single word about it, because the mark is faint. Fainter than it should be. It’s almost half as faint as it usually is. Why??

"This," Balinar murmurs, in disgust as he studies it. "should never have been allowed to happen in the first place." He growls as he releases my wrist.

He then grabs my jaw hard enough that I feel my teeth grind painfully against each other. He forces my head to turn, exposing the side of my neck, and I gulp.

His hand finds another mark there. Koda’s mark.

His eyes darken even further, but I don’t care about his reaction. All I care about...is why Zephan’s mark is so faint.

Is Koda’s mark faint as well??

I don’t understand it. These marks have never faded. Not once, not in all the weeks since each of them was placed against my skin. Marks don’t fade... Why then—

Balinar studies the mark a moment longer, tilting his head, and the anger in his eyes shifts from cruelty to calculation.

"Interesting," he murmurs, mostly to himself, his thumb pressing against Koda’s mark, like he’s testing whether it’ll hold beneath pressure. "It seems the greater part of these belonged to the intruder. Not to you."

He informs me, and I go still. Very still.

"That makes things much easier," he continues, releasing my jaw at last.

He drags his palm roughly across my cheek as he pulls his hand away.

"Now that the intruder is gone, it shouldn’t take much at all to finish erasing what’s left of these disgusting things." He says as he straightens with a twisted smile on his face. " I rid you of them. The marks, the memories attached to them... The Alphas...All of it, really, if I’m thorough."

Something cold drops straight through my chest.

"I’ll erase every single trace of them. Starting with that abomination in your belly." He says, like he’s offering me mercy instead of a threat.

My heart stops completely, and I know, in that moment, exactly what this is. This isn’t punishment for leaving... This isn’t discipline, or correction like he used to give. This isn’t any of the softer words he likes to dress his cruelty in when it suits him.

This is reclamation. Total, complete reclamation...Of me. He means to erase not just what I’ve become, but every trace of proof that I ever became something other than his toy.

He means to take me back. Back to Elkhorn...back to that room I spent years learning every crack and shadow of, back to a version of my life I had let myself believe, foolishly, I’d escaped the night the Ashfangs bought me and gave me somewhere else to be...Someone else to be.

And he means to erase everything that happened in between. Not just the marks fading on my skin, but the Alphas who put them there. He plans to erase whatever love grew for them...complicated and hard-won, in the distance between my fear of him and safety with them. He plans to erase our daughter.

He means to make it so that none of it ever happened at all—so thoroughly that even I might one day stop being able to prove to myself that it did.

Because that’s what he does. He takes lives and...erases and rewrites as much as he wills u til your history and identity become only what he allows to be.

My hand moves to my stomach, pressing against the small curve there, and I feel her—small, steady... a gentle pressure against my palm that tells me she’s still here, still ours, still safe for exactly as long as I can manage to keep her that way.

I reach for Elián next, out of pure reflex, the way I’ve reached for him a thousand times these past months whenever fear got too large to carry alone...whenever the weight of everything threatened to pull me under, and I needed to know, instantly, that I wasn’t drowning by myself.

Nothing answers.

I reach again, deeper this time, searching the space inside myself where he’s always been since the night I first felt him stir awake alongside me. I search for that particular warmth, that particular shape of him, present even in silence...even in the long stretches where neither of us had anything left to say to the other.

But there’s nothing there. Just quiet.

Not the quiet he goes when he’s thinking something through before speaking. This is different. This is absence...A space where a person used to be, hollowed out clean, with nothing left behind to mark that he was ever here at all.

Panic claws up through my chest, stealing whatever composure I managed to hold onto through the slap, through the bruising grip on my jaw.

They really took him.

Not just separated us... Not just suppressed him... They took him—pulled him somewhere entirely outside of me, somewhere I can’t follow no matter how hard or how deep I search, and I don’t know if that means he’s still alive to be reached at all, or if I am simply searching, over and over, for something that no longer exists to be found.

The cloaked figures never said what they intend to do with him. I don’t need them to. I’ve felt, firsthand, what this world does to things it decides don’t belong in it.

I press my palm harder against my stomach, grounding myself in the one certainty I still have left—she’s here, she’s alive, I can still feel her moving beneath my hand, even if half her father’s presence has gone utterly, terrifyingly silent.

Balinar stands above me, watching my face with the particular satisfaction of a man who believes, entirely and without doubt, that he has already won.

"You’ll come home," he says, like this is kindness. Like this was always inevitable. "And this time, I won’t make the same mistakes I made before."

I don’t answer him. I’m no longer thinking about him at all.

Balinar turns away eventually, speaking to someone standing just outside my line of sight; his voice drops too low for me to fully catch his words. I let it fade into background noise, distant and meaningless, because none of it matters half as much as the one thing I still desperately need to know.

Is there some way I can save Elian? Reach him? Like the time I got pulled away from him, and he found me, and brought me back.

Can the baby and I save him? Can we bring him back?

I close my eyes and reach inward once again. I reach past the panic clawing at my ribs, past the pain still throbbing through my cheek, past the taste of blood on my tongue...searching for even the faintest trace of him. I’ll take anything. A whisper, a flicker, some small proof that he’s still somewhere close enough to hear me calling.

"Elián," I whisper, so quiet even I barely hear it myself. "Please. Say something."

I get nothing.

"I need you," I try again, and my voice cracks in a way I haven’t allowed myself to be in front of anyone in years. "Please. Just—say something. Anything at all."

The silence remains. Utter silence that whispers to me that from now on...It’s just me.

And the only thing I have left to hold onto in this entire world... Is our daughter—still safe and steady beneath my palm, and a vast, aching emptiness where the only other person who has ever truly understood what it means to survive inside this exact body used to be.