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NIRVANA I ignored the pain in my chest, so much pain making me heave. I called everyone through our link, but none responded, including Knight.
My chin began to tremble both from fear and hopelessness. I was left alone with a broken heart, losing all my hopes.
One thing I’d hoped for, hoping they were still all alive.
I stood tall, closed my eyes, and pulled every ounce of strength I could from Asina. I hadn’t fought that monster, but something weakened me, or Cyrius’s power was too strong around this forest.
I put the dagger back into my boot and concealed it. As fear coiled in my chest, I leaped forward, ran, and jumped into the barrier, aiming to get through it. The force of energy shocked me, flinging me away, my back hitting the fallen tree.
My back arched, and I whined in pain. Searing in agony, I got up, staggering forward. Never for a second did I hesitate. I could do it.
I thought of everyone back at the vineyards who expected us to win in this battle.
I thought of the people I loved who were waiting for me to come back. I thought of my parents and my mother, who wished me to triumph. I could not disappoint them, even if it meant giving away my life in the end.
“If you think I will give up, you’re wrong.” I jumped again, making sure I would not hit the barrier he had created. Instead, I landed, stood before it, yanked my fists, and slammed them against the iridescent light. I saw it thin as I kept banging my fists.
“I will kill you!” The ripples of force spread over the surface of the barrier, and I watched it begin to disappear.
“Nirvana, are you there?”
My heart skipped a beat as I finally heard Knight’s voice. “Baby, I’m here. Are you okay?”
“Don’t mind us. We will make sure we can clear up your way. Do what you must, but make sure to destroy the cocoon. That’s where he was creating his minions. And sweetheart, come back to me. I love you.”
“I love you, Knight.” My eyes blurred with tears as I stepped inside the barrier, and our link was gone. And there was another wall, somewhat like a cocoon.
Horror filled me as I saw what was before me, where the energy was coming from-the ground, but that was not all. All the alphas, Archibald, including my friends Sebastien, Luka, McKaye, and Califf, and my mate, were unconscious.
How was that possible? I was just talking to Knight.
Son of a bitch!
“No!” I ran towards Knight as he was wrapped in weaving tendrils. I screamed in terror as it coiled around their bodies until they were covered, and I couldn’t see them anymore.
“Do you think you’re so clever?”
I jumped at the echoey voice, which was so cold it gave me a shiver. I spun around, and although I had been scared earlier, I was beyond terrified now that he was standing before me, almost like just a shadow in his long coat touching the ground.
He scented my fear. I could even smell my own. Before I knew what I was doing, I charged a punch at him with a single motion.
A wave of light burst through me, but it didn’t make him flinch. It was like just air passing through him.
“You have no power here.”
Good to know.
When I realized he seemed right, goosebumps erupted on my skin. I couldn’t feel the sensation of Asina’s presence and the tingling of her power.
“What do you want from me?”
“Your life and the dagger.”
I scoffed. “You did all this madness for that? Why don’t you take it from me and kill me already? If I didn’t have power in here, then maybe outside.” With everything I got, I rammed him with my shoulder, sending him tumbling across the ground. I was on top of him in a second, and I punched him harder many times, but it didn’t even hurt him.
I aimed to reach the dagger in my boots, but he barely touched the space between us. I flung away, waited, and prepared myself for the pain of my fall, but it didn’t happen. He kept me suspended in the air.
I began gasping to breathe, and I could feel my shoulder and my neck breaking with just a gesture of his finger. The fight merely started, and I already felt helpless.
When my eyes began to roll, he dropped me to the ground.
I realized he intentionally made me suffer, and enough not to kill me. I found myself curling in a ball. He yanked me and threw me back into his cocoon.
“Give up now, and they will have a chance to live.” He hanged me from my wrists and tied me on my legs.
“Fuck you. So you could rule the underworld? A life with you in it is like living a life in hell. Hard pass, asshole.”
“Then I will just have to torture you.” He pulled the tendrils, roots, and vines around my wrist so my limbs were all stretched out to the point of almost splitting them from my body.
I screamed in agony and fury, and I felt helpless as I looked down at the people who tried to help me, all gone.
“Join me, Nirvana, and I promise you-”
“Fuck you! Not gonna happen.” Tears poured down my face, and my limbs began shaking. “Where’s Ambrose?”
He was seemingly grinning, but it looked like he was wincing. He was really creepy. “He’s dead.”
“Yet you are still desperate and unsatisfied. Why is that?”
He did it with his hand, and the tendrils and vines covered Knight’s face.
Feeling my heart breaking, I could still hear my mate gasping to breathe.
“Him or the dagger.”
“He wouldn’t have let me give up the lives of millions for your insanity, Cyrius. You should know that by now. So nice try. Agh!” My fingers shivered. I could feel the skin peeling off my flesh and the vines ripping into my bones.
When he woke up Knight, I couldn’t look at him anymore. I squeezed my eyes shut and blocked everything around me, but with the source of his power surging from the ground, he quickly got into my head.
“Why are you fighting over it when you know you can’t win?”
“Because I have the people who loved me and believed in me. I can’t let them down. Unlike you, you’re a monster who lived a long life but walked alone on this earth without anyone to love you, and who could love a monster like you? That’s why I fight for them.”
“Very well, like this?” He struck Knight with his magic on the neck, and I saw the black-purple poison spreading through his veins.
I shut my mouth, but my eyes said differently as tears rolled down my cheeks. I sobbed helplessly and hopelessly.
“How selfish of you? You let them suffer because you wanted to save them? You let the man you love die with you for the sake of people who are already dead?”
“You don’t know that!”
“The moment you left them, you let them die, Nirvana. You have no one to go back to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He struck me with the lightning and showed me how everyone in the pack house died- Kailin, my grandfather, Dylan, Lennox, the twins, those girls, Maddox, Kaleb, and Dane. They all died with the same fate, blood flooding the floor.
“Liar! I don’t believe you. You can create illusion all you want, but you can never get what you want unless you kill me!”
“Zarah left to save herself, to tell the story of how she failed everyone. Save them and come with me.”
“Why don’t you just kill me if you want my life and the dagger so bad?” My head turned to Knight as he howled in pain. The poison was spreading fast all over his body. “Make it stop!” It hurt me to watch him suffer- the agony he felt, every howl he let go, tore my heart open.
“Then come with me.” He let go of the vines around my feet.
Grinding my teeth, I narrowed my eyes at him. “Let them go, Cyrius, then you will get what you want.”
One thing I didn’t understand was why he didn’t just take my life or take the dagger so he could go on his merry way.
Then I burst out laughing, my voice echoing throughout the forest. One thing I regretted was not reading the whole book.
I looked at him, still laughing. “You need me alive, and I should come with you willingly, isn’t it?”
His black eyes as abyss narrowed at me, and when he clasped his hand, my chest clenched, and I could feel my ribs and lungs imploding.
“You can’t take the dagger either because it should be given to you, Cyrius. You son of a bitch.” I began coughing out blood and breathing raggedly. “Hence, you took everyone I cared about. You did all these troubles and chaos because of me, and then you lost.” So, he did not wield the dagger himself. It was indeed Katzius’s blood dagger. “My mother saw your death in her hands, did she? But you keep me alive to manipulate me and change the course of your pathetic life?”
“Then I will just kill the love of your life.” He snapped Knight’s neck. I heard it crack, and it was the most excruciating soul-crashing sound I’d ever heard.
For a moment, I froze. My body numbed as I stared at endless darkness. My heart broke a thousand pieces, and I still felt what it was like to lose someone you only loved.
“I will restore the balance.”
I looked him in the eye, gritting my teeth in so much fury. “Then I should just kill myself so I could be with the people I loved.”
“You just got what you wished for.” Then he hurled me against the ground.
A sudden memory flared to life-my life with Knight from how we met until our first kiss, to the moment we got married, and to the last time we shared a kiss. And it all just faded away.
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“You can have all those back, Nirvana. Just come with me.”
Despite losing that certain memory, I still knew how much I loved that person, and I still felt he was important to me- the ache in my chest and the bleeding of my heart, for that man tried to make me forget.
Love was mysterious, profound, and defying explanation; only the heart could understand. Cyrius had no heart and could not win by taking all that mattered to me.
So long as my heart beats for the people I love, I will never forget what love means.
It was too bad for him. He only got into my brain.