Page 51 of Branded By Shadow
Damon...I can feel you. It’s true. I matter.
Of course you do,I sent back, the thought a vow, a promise sealed in our shared heart.
The rightness of the moment hit me with a power greater than the Shadow Realm itself. She understood. She finally, truly understood. And so did I.
She was mine, and my own curse now knew her as part of myself. Alexander had meant to show the world my weakness. Instead, he had forced me to forge my greatest strength.
For him, this was far from over. But she’d chosen me, and there was nothing he could do about it now.
I’d won, and he’d just have to live with his failure.
20
Hera's Blessing
Cora
Back in my second year of botany, Theo had taken us to the edge of the campus grounds to show us a black walnut tree. It was magnificent, a towering giant of dark bark and sweeping branches that commanded the landscape.
But nothing grew beneath it. Its roots released chemicals that choked out competition, and its taproot was strong enough to crack concrete foundations. It didn’t mean to destroy. It simply required everything to survive.
The bond felt like that tree.
It was a majestic, living thing that had taken root in the soil of my chest, its presence a suffocating, exhausting weight. I lovedit from the moment I sensed it, but at the same time, I knew it could easily crush me.
So much had happened between Damon and me. Our connection had been forged by instinct and circumstance, by an attraction I hadn’t understood myself. I’d chosen him in the end. I’d believed that he’d choose me, too. But I hadn’t expected how that choice would make me feel.
Damon and I lay together, side by side, a still point in the aftermath of a hurricane. The silence between us stretched, thick and heavy with everything that had just passed. Through the new, thrumming root system in my chest, I could feel the state of him. It was a vibrating tension, like a thousand tightly wound steel cables holding back an ocean of pure, annihilating chaos.
I couldn’t stay silent anymore. I was still carrying the traces of his ownership on my skin, but the claiming process had been hard on him, too. “Damon?”
He didn’t move, but a low grunt from deep in his chest confirmed he’d heard me.
“Are you... alright?”
“Fine,” he bit out, the word clipped and dismissive, a reflexive shield.
It was a lie. A blatant, obvious lie. For the first time, I knew it with a certainty that was absolute and had nothing to do with observation. The bond screamed the truth his mouth wouldn’tspeak. A wave of his hollowed-out exhaustion washed over me through our connection. It was the feeling of a fortress whose walls were still standing, but whose garrison had been bled dry to the last man.
“Don’t lie to me,” I murmured, turning my head on the cold stone to face him. “Not anymore. I can... feel it.”
His eyes finally opened, black and fathomless, and fixed on mine. He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t. Through the bond, I sent a thought, a fragile, awed whisper into the new, shared space between us.
The darkness. During the claiming. It was reaching for me. The void... you held it back.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. For a moment, I felt a flash of what he’d experienced—a sensation of absolute, devouring cold, the horrifying emptiness of a grave that wanted to snuff out the warmth of my blood. He pushed himself upright, his movements stiff with a pain he refused to acknowledge. His response came back through the link, not as words, but as a pure, undiluted concept. It was a wall of bedrock, the unshakeable, primal law of his being.
Letting it have you was not an option.
The absolute nature of his protectiveness was just as demanding and all-consuming as the physical bond itself. I was bound not just to a man, but to the crushing weight of his victory. And Iwanted nothing more than to crawl into his arms and lay there forever.
“You did it,” a calm voice said, cutting through our private world. “I admit, I had my doubts.”
Helena Winters stood at the edge of the platform, her expression one of genuine, maternal pride. “But look at you both now. Still here, still together. Alive. I couldn’t be prouder.”
Her lavender perfume cut through the metallic tang of blood and power, a clean, calming presence in the aftermath. Her gaze was soft as she took in our state.
Damon managed to lift his head enough to meet her eyes. “We couldn’t have done it without your support, Helena. I mean that.”
