Free Web NovelChapter 281: Chapter 281: Something touched me
"Eleven seconds," Damon said.
"Three bonded mates present," Vessa said. "All three. At the throne. At the moment of ascension." She looked at the three brothers. "No Seraphim heir has ever ascended with three bonded mates. We don’t know what that number does to the completion time."
Eve looked at her mates.
Damian looking back at her steadily.
Silas already thinking ahead. She could see it in his face.
Damon with his arms crossed and his jaw set and his eyes on her with the expression he used when he’d already decided something and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"We’re going to the Court," Damon said.
"Yes," Eve replied.
"All of us."
"Yes," she said.
"And we’re doing this before Varek gets any closer."
***
Vessa stayed back for dinner.
Nobody had asked her to but nobody had suggested she leave either so she had stayed.
After dinner Eve found her in the kitchen washing up.
She stood in the doorway.
"You’ve known about Varek for a long time," Eve said.
"Yes," Vessa said. She didn’t stop washing. "Since before your parents died. I knew it was circling then. I thought...." She paused. "I thought if the ascension completed it would close the window permanently and Varek would move on." She set a cup down. "I didn’t anticipate Malachai moving when he did."
"None of us anticipated Malachai," Eve said.
"No," Vessa said. "He was always the variable nobody accounted for."
Eve leaned against the doorframe.
"When we go to the Court," she said. "Will you come with us."
Vessa looked at her.
"You don’t have to ask," she said.
"I’m asking anyway," Eve said.
Vessa turned, picked up the napkin on the table and dried her hands
Then she turned around. "Yes," she said. "I’ll come."
***
That night Eve lay awake.
Damian was asleep beside her, his arm across her waist, his breathing slow and even.
She stared at the ceiling.
The pull was there. Steady in her chest.
She understood it now.
It wasn’t Varek. It wasn’t a threat or a warning.
It was the throne.
Six hundred years of a binding waiting to be completed. Avara’s work, patient and ancient, reaching across the distance for the heir that had been missing for twenty years.
Not pulling her toward danger.
Pulling her home. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
She put her hand flat on her chest.
Felt the pendant under her fingers.
L.A.
Her parents had been stopped before they could complete it.
She wasn’t going to be stopped.
She closed her eyes.
Tomorrow she would tell the pack. Make the arrangements. Contact Raphael at the Court and let him know they were coming.
Tonight she let herself lie in the dark with Damian’s arm across her waist and the pull in her chest and the knowledge that she knew what it was and what she had to do.
She wasn’t afraid.
She was ready.
***
She woke up at three in the morning and couldn’t breathe.
Not choking. Not a nightmare. Just.....pressure. Flat and heavy on her chest like something had put its hand over her heart and pressed down.
She sat up.
The room was dark. Damian asleep beside her, breathing slow and even. Everything normal. Everything exactly as it should be.
But her hands were shaking.
She pressed them flat against her thighs and breathed and tried to understand what had just happened.
The pull was still there. The same thread she’d been feeling for three weeks. But it felt different now. Disturbed. Like something had found it and tugged it hard enough to wake her from a dead sleep.
Something had touched her.
Through the throne bond.
She was certain of it the way she was certain of things she couldn’t fully explain, deep and immediate and not negotiable.
Something had found the thread and used it to reach her.
And whatever it was it had felt old. Cold. Patient in a way that made her skin crawl.
She sat in the dark for a moment.
Then she reached over and put her hand on Damian’s chest.
"Damian," she said.
He was awake immediately. Zero to present in under a second, no groggy middle ground.
He sat up and looked at her face and whatever he saw there made him reach for her.
"What happened," he said.
"Something touched me," she said. "Through the throne bond. Whatever Vessa was talking about." She looked at her hands. They were still shaking slightly. "It found the thread. It pushed through it."
Damian went very still.
"Are you hurt," he said.
"No," she said. "Just...." She stopped. "It felt like a warning. Like something telling me it knows where I am."
He pulled her in.
She let him.
Pressed her face against his chest and breathed.
His arms were tight around her. She could feel his heart beating faster than normal. He was afraid. He was trying not to show it but she knew him well enough now to feel it anyway.
"I couldn’t feel it through the bond," he said quietly. "Whatever reached you. I felt nothing."
"I know," she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
She knew what that silence meant.
Something had gotten to her through a channel he couldn’t access. Couldn’t monitor. Couldn’t put himself between her and.
That was the thing scaring him.
Not the touch itself.
The fact that he hadn’t felt it coming.
She told the others at six in the morning.
Didn’t wait for a reasonable hour. Knocked on Silas’s door first then Damon’s and said come to the kitchen now and they both came without asking questions because her face answered every question before they could ask it.
She told them plainly.
Three in the morning. The pressure. The cold patience of whatever had touched her. The shaking hands she was still trying to stop.
Damon listened without moving.
When she finished he looked at Damian.
"How close," he said.
"Close enough to reach her through the bond," Damian said. "Last night it couldn’t do that."
