VALERIE.
The bond no longer tore me apart. For the first time since this nightmare began—since my village burned, since I was taken, used, broken—I felt something that had once seemed impossible:
Balance.
I stood in the center of the shrine as the last pulse of golden light faded into the morning sky. The sigils beneath my feet dimmed, but the echo of their magic lingered in my veins. The cloaks the men wore still shimmered faintly: Jason in crimson, Jasper in silver, Dorian in midnight blue. They’d bound themselves not just to me, but to the fate that tied us all. “You are not merely three men and one woman,” Madam Rose had whispered during the ceremony. “You are the three pillars upon which the new world must stand—or fall.”
No pressure, right?
We returned to Dorian’s realm by dusk,
