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“Never. You’re mine to keep safe, viyella.” His hands cup my face, rough and trembling. “And I—I love you. I love you so much.”

It’s not a proclamation born only of triumph. It’s the truth laid bare, the vow that carried him through the dark and the damnation to find me.

I feel it thrumming in the bond, in the whale’s slow breathing beneath us, in the hush that has settled over the wounded sea.

For a dizzying second, I want to claim the magic back—tell him that he is the thing that saved me, that his roar and his tenderness and the way he bent the world are the miracles I didn’t know I needed.

But even saying nothing, I think I understand it all.

Nightfall is the magic I didn’t realize I had been looking for my entire life. And Kael? He’s the one that makes everything worth it.

All the trials and tribulations.

All the danger and confusion.

Knowing he loves me?

It’s—it’s everything.

Chapter 27

Kael

Fightingthe Black Tide

The water is black fire around me.

Shadow coils bite into my tentacles, searing like acid, pulling, trying to drag me down into some pit beyond the abyss.

Idris’s magic clings like tar, every strike with my trident cutting nothing but smoke.

This SoulTaker is a beast. And he is massive.

A form shifting creature—sometimes claws, sometimes tendrils, sometimes the face of every nightmare I have ever had.

It hisses through the dark.

She will drown. She is mine.

Rage surges hotter than the storm.

“She isnotyours. She ismine.”

My roar shakes the sea, but still the thing laughs, still it tightens.

My limbs thrash, each movement powerful but clumsy, the new Titan strength too raw to control.

For the first time, doubt slithers close.

Then—something cuts through the black.

A voice. Not mine. Not the Lords.

Phoebe.

My Telya.

The bond between us flares bright as a star. She calls—not to me, butthroughme. Outward. To the sea.

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