Asleep *FINISHED!/COMPLETE*

*Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

JASE

I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my blurry, tear filled eyes, while also questioning over and over again if I were dreaming or not.

She was alive… but…

She had been dead.

She had DIED.

I had felt it… to the very core of my soul… all breath had left her lungs as she stepped out of this world, I could feel it in the depths of my soul. It had only been for a few moments, but those moments had felt like hours… like lifetimes.

But yet, there she was. Moving. Breathing. Telling me that everything was going to be ok, though she still faded in and out of consciousness.

The intensity of the pain I had felt at losing her for those moments was beyond comprehension. Beyond explanation. There are no words in existence to describe the way my soul felt, as though it was being torn from my body at the loss of my Soulbound.

The one who literally carried pieces of my own heavenly DNA crossing the barriers between this world and the next, snuffing out the life of a million tiny fragments that made up my very soul along with it…

Torture.

I’d rather have been tortured. I’d rather have been dead. And then brought back to life. And then murdered again… 100 times over… before ever experiencing that level of pain ever again.

I pressed her as firmly to my chest as I could without hurting her, fearing causing her to fade again. As I held her, I tried to stop it. I tried to stop the tears, the sobs, the anguish.

But my heart, my soul, the very fragments of my being felt as though they were being slowly and painfully stitched back together with every slow and steady breath she took beneath me. With every inhale and exhale, there was a torrent of both excruciating pain and indescribable bliss. Fear and relief. Pain and bliss. Over and over, as I tried to find myself again.

I don’t know how much time passed before dad came. It could have been minutes or hours. Seconds or days. And I couldn’t make out the words he spoke, couldn’t hold onto them long enough to grasp them… but I do know that it took the strongest wave of a Commanders Illumine that I’d ever felt, to finally get me to even acknowledge anyone else in the room.

Finally, between my father’s Command ability and my brothers Warrior Illumine, they were able to pry me off of Elliana and pull me away from her. But my eyes never left her face, her chest, needing to see it still rising and falling with her steady breaths, her eyes… Though they were now closed as she wavered in between states of consciousness.

The level of both pain and relief I still felt swirling and warring inside of me simultaneously as I was dragged away from her, had me completely drained now, and when she finally left my sight, I walked lifelessly to wherever it was they were leading me.

I suppose it was to my bed, though, because the next thing I remember seeing, were the streams of light from the following day peaking through the cracks of the heavy curtains inside my silent room.

I opened my eyes, then shut them again as my brain was trying to ward off the remnants of restless sleep. I blinked once, then twice, then shot up with wide eyes as the memories of my Elliana laying lifelessly on the floor came flooding back to me.

“Ellie,” I breathed, before running to wherever the invisible thread that linked my soul to hers led me.