I threw my arms around Kaillen, immense relief flooding me, as my otherworldly powers continued to hum and flow inside me.

“You’re alive! You’re still here!” I held him close and thanked the gods that he hadn’t been killed.

I couldn’t make sense of time and day, space or matter. It was as if the past five minutes or hour or day, or however long I’d been trapped in the portal’s void and gone to another realm, had all been squashed into milliseconds. All of the events had become one big jumbled mess, like a kaleidoscope of chaos.

“How are you still alive?” Kaillen looked down at me as crimson fire burned in his eyes, yet that devastated look remained. “I felt the bond snap. I thought you’d been killed.”

I nodded. “I thought you were dead too. I felt the mate bond break as well, and I thought that you . . .” A sob shook my chest.

His eyes shuttered as his gaze roamed over my face. I waited for my wolf to whine in eagerness and happiness that her mate was okay, but she remained silent.

I shook my head. It was all so much. “Where’s Jakub?”

“We have him captured.” Commander Klebus nodded toward a man on his knees in the corner. “He’s the only one you didn’t . . . kill.” Her throat bobbed in a swallow. “He’d been trying to escape but Mr. King stopped him.”

Jakub was cuffed and kneeling on the floor, four SF members surrounding him. All of them had their particle guns aimed at his head.

Jakub’s cool eyes locked onto mine, yet despite the vulnerable position he was currently in, he didn’t look dismayed. Instead, triumph filled his eyes—a true emotion, the first real one I’d ever seen him wear—before that cool clinical smile lifted his lips.

I shuddered.

A finger traced along my neck, and I snapped my attention back to Kaillen. As soon as I peered up at him, his finger dropped. He shook his head as he glanced at my neck again, confusion twisting his features.

I tried to tug on the bond, tried to sense what he was feeling, but then remembered it was gone. So I sniffed, trying to detect his emotions, but all that filled my nose were the remnants of casted magic and burned flesh.

Frowning, I stared up at Kaillen as a sick sense of dread filled my belly.

“Where did you go?” he asked as a storm of confusion, despair, and disbelief waged in his eyes.

“Go?”

“You disappeared for a while during the battle. And when you reappeared, the mate bond broke.”

“I . . . I went . . .” I felt inside me again for my wolf, for her presence, but all that loomed back at me was a tidal wave of those otherworldly powers, unleashed and humming through me.

A moment of panic filled me. Where are you? I called to her.

Silence.

“Where’s my wolf?” I swung around in a circle, as if I could find her outside of my body, waiting or hiding, which was absolutely ridiculous. “I don’t feel her or the mate bond.” I whirled back to Kaillen and stared at him imploringly. “Where? Where did she go?”

A grim expression overtook his face. “I don’t feel her either.”

I shook my head frantically. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happened, Tala.” A look of anguish contorted his features. “My wolf—” His throat bobbed in a swallow. “He’s mourning right now, howling inside me. He knows your wolf is gone. He knows she died.”

My heart cracked “She died? No, that can’t be.” I shook my head frantically. “And what do you mean that your wolf’s in mourning? I’m still his mate, and I’m right here.”

“But your wolf isn’t. She’s gone, Tala. I can feel it.”

My hand flew to my mouth because as much as I wanted to deny it, I could feel that he was right. When I reached inside me to find my wolf again, nothing greeted me. Nothing.

That acceptance hit me like a freight train. My wolf was gone. Dead. Vanished. My beautiful, strong she-wolf . . . the wolf I had initially rejected, yet had grown to cherish in such a short time, was dead.

“No, please no.” A wail tore from my throat.

Kaillen looked down at me, his chest rising as anguish distorted his features. “My wolf . . . he doesn’t believe you’re his mate. He doesn’t recognize you anymore.”

“What?” The shocked whisper flew from my lips, and that was when I felt it. Saw it.

Kaillen was looking at me with anguish and confusion, but not with love. Not as he had only hours ago.

Cold hurt and devastation slammed into me. “Kaillen?” I whispered, unable to keep the pained ache from my tone. “No. Don’t say that. It’s not true!” Tears streamed down my face, but he made no move to comfort me or hold me.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions here.” Commander Klebus cut in, breaking me away from Kaillen as she began issuing orders. “We need to get you to a healing center and checked out, and we need to get everyone out of here, and that—” She gazed toward the cracked floor, and with a gasp I took in the waving turquoise portal door that had grown around it. “That needs to be contained.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line. She looked pale, her golden skin ashen, as if whatever had occurred in this room haunted her to the depths of her soul.

“What’s happened?” I called to Kaillen again, needing to touch him, feel him, be reassured by him, but his confused expression remained. “Kaillen!”

He shook his head as his shoulders tensed. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Tala, but I need to get back to the fae lands. Barnabas and Fallon were also knocked out by whatever Jakub did to us. I left them, to rally the SF and find you, but I need to check on them.”

He strode toward the exit of the room, pulling his yellow crystal from his pocket as he went.

And that was when I knew.

Whatever had been born between Kaillen and me had been shredded in a matter of minutes or hours. Whatever Jakub had done, whatever power had erupted inside me and transported me to that distant world, had also eradicated our bond, had killed my wolf, had destroyed whatever remnant of myself had been planted firmly in this world. The person that Kaillen’s wolf had sensed as his mate had died, and now, whoever I was, whatever I was, his wolf no longer recognized as his mate.

To his wolf, his mate had died.

And everyone knew how male wolves reacted when their mate died. They closed off, they retreated into mourning, they no longer wanted any woman of any kind.

I felt inside me for my wolf again, hoping against hope that she was still there, that I could find her if I simply searched hard enough, dug deep enough.

But my search proved fruitless.

She had truly vanished.

A sob shook my chest. Only days ago, I’d been wishing she’d never been born, but now? Now it felt as though I’d lost a piece of my soul.

“Kaillen?” I called after him again, my voice pleading. “My love? It’s still me. I’m still Tala.”

He stopped at the edge of the room and turned back to me. Crimson fire rolled in his eyes, but that golden flare was gone. His eyes dipped to my neck again, his expression impossible to read. His brow furrowed, and a fleeting sense of confusion washed over his features for the millionth time.

“It’s gone,” he eventually said with finality. “The bond that sealed us is gone.”

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Chapter 27

Three days later, I stood in my bathroom and stared in the mirror at the tattoo encircling my neck. Stars. Constellations. Foreign symbols. They ringed my skin in an intricate design of alien purpose and power. Whatever had awoken in Jakub’s concrete warehouse had permanently marked itself into my very essence.

I tilted my head, studying the mark. It was different to the single tattoo on Jakub’s men, and my tattoo didn’t seem to serve the same purpose. As we’d learned since capturing Jakub, the constellation tattoo had been a way to combine Jakub’s magic with the magic of those that worked for him. An ancient spell had linked them through the tattoo, allowing Jakub to harness his men’s power and wield it. It was what had made him so powerful. And when Jakub had activated the tattoos’ spell—which had made the tattoos glow—Jakub had been sucking magic directly from his men, which explained his inexplicable power when we’d battled him at sea.