The Little is enough exactly as she is.
My eyes blurred when I read that line.
Enough. I'd spent twenty-seven years trying to be enough—trying to earn my place through service, through sacrifice, through pain willingly taken. And here it was, written in shadow and starlight: I was enough already. Not because of what I could do. Simply because I was.
A tear slid down my cheek. I didn't wipe it away.
Morgrith produced a blade—small, sharp, made of something that looked like condensed shadow. The darkness that formed it seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat, ancient and eager.
"Blood to seal it," he said. His voice was steady, but I felt the tremor beneath it through the bond. "Yours and mine, mingled on the vellum."
He met my gaze.
"This will trigger the next stage of your transformation. It may be . . . intense."
I held out my palm without hesitation.
The cut was quick, clean, surprisingly painless—or perhaps the anticipation drowned out the sting. I watched my blood well up from the thin line across my palm and felt my breath catch.
It wasn't quite red anymore.
The blood that pooled in my cupped palm was darker than it should have been. Threaded with something that caught the starlight—deep purple filaments, strands of captured darkness woven through the crimson. My transformation was already changing me at the cellular level.
Morgrith cut his own palm with the same quick efficiency. His blood was something else entirely: silver-black, like liquid shadow, like the space between stars given physical form. It pooled in his hand and seemed to glow faintly with inner light.
"Together," he said softly.
We pressed our palms together over the vellum.
The sensation that flooded through me was nothing like pain—or rather, it was pain transformed into something else entirely.
Pleasure.
Pleasure so intense it bordered on agony, so vast it overwhelmed every other sense. My back arched. My vision went white. I felt shadows rushing through my veins like liquid fire, felt the bond between us solidify into something unbreakable—not threads anymore but chains, not connection but fusion,two souls pressing together until the boundary between them blurred and dissolved.
And then I felt him.
Not just his presence. Not just the echo of his heartbeat that had become as familiar as my own. I felt his emotions crash into my awareness with overwhelming clarity, and the force of it nearly drove me to my knees.
He wanted me.
God, he wanted me so badly it was burning him alive.
I felt the restraint he'd been showing—the patience, the careful distance, the gentle care that masked a hunger so vast it terrified even him. I felt the nights he'd spent lying awake, feeling my heartbeat through the bond, aching with the need to go to me. To claim me. To bury himself inside me and never leave.
I felt the way he touched himself in the dark hours, imagining my mouth, my hands, my body opening for him. Felt the shame that followed—not because the desire was wrong, but because he wanted to be better than this. Wanted to give me time. Wanted to earn the gift of my surrender rather than demanding it.
I felt ten thousand years of loneliness compress into a single burning point: the knowledge that I existed, that I was here, that the mate he'd waited millennia for was finally within reach.
And he couldn't have me. Not yet. Not until the magic was stable. Not until the risk was gone.
The wanting was destroying him.
I gasped. He gasped.
And beneath the flood of his desire, I felt something else. Something older. Deeper. Not his.
A flash of an ancient sky, violet and strange, with two moons hanging heavy on the horizon. The scent of flowers I'd never encountered—sweet, intoxicating, something that had been extinct for ten thousand years. A voice that wasn't quite mine,wasn't quite separate from me, whispering through the depths of my consciousness: