Chapter 179 - 178: I thought I lost You!

Eleanore should have been annoyed by that. The quiet overprotectiveness of it, the small deception layered beneath his easy permission that morning. Instead, standing here with her pulse still hammering and the memory of that thing’s shapeless, hungry lunge still burned into her mind, she found she couldn’t summon anything but gratitude.

"Thank you," she said quietly, "for following me. For not actually letting me go alone, even when you said you would."

"Don’t thank me. Just—" His voice caught slightly, some rawness slipping through the careful composure he usually maintained even in the middle of a crisis. "Don’t ever do that to me again. Do you understand? I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been even a minute later. If that thing had reached you before I did."

"I didn’t plan on nearly dying today, Caelestis."

"That’s not funny."

"I wasn’t trying to be funny." But some of the tension in her chest eased despite herself, the dry humor slipping out involuntarily, the same small defense mechanism she always reached for when things got too heavy to sit with directly. It seemed to work on him too. Some of the rigid fear in his shoulders easing slightly, even as his hands stayed exactly where they were, unwilling to let go just yet.

He exhaled slowly, forehead dropping to rest gently against hers, his hands still cradling her face like she might shatter if he released her too quickly. "I thought I lost you," he murmured, quiet enough that it felt like it wasn’t entirely meant for her ears, more a confession to himself than anything else. "For a second there, watching that thing come at you, watching you fall backward with nowhere left to run — I actually thought I was going to be too late."

"You didn’t," she said softly, reaching up to cover one of his hands with her own, holding it there against her cheek. "I’m here. I’m alright. You made it."

"You’re shaking."

"So are you," she pointed out, feeling the faint, betraying tremor still running through his fingers.

That drew a small, surprised huff of breath from him, something almost like a laugh, though it came out rough and unsteady. "Fair point."

They stood there for a long moment, foreheads pressed together, the chaos of the border and the distant echo of the danger they’d just faced fading slowly into something quieter, something more intimate. The space between them charged with everything neither of them had quite said outright yet. When he finally kissed her, it wasn’t hesitant like the first time. It was steady, certain, carrying the full, unspoken weight of how close he’d just come to losing her entirely, and she melted into it without a shred of the shyness that usually crept into moments like this.

"We should go," she murmured eventually, though she made no actual move to step back.

"In a minute," Caelestis said, arms tightening around her instead, clearly not ready to let go just yet. "Just — give me one more minute. I need it, Eleanore. Let me have this one minute before the rest of the world comes back."

And so, despite the lingering danger, despite the border chaos and the unanswered questions about what exactly had just attacked her and why, Eleanore let herself stay there a moment longer, wrapped fully in his arms, finally, quietly certain of one single thing amid all the uncertainty that whatever else was coming, whatever darkness still waited out there for her, she wouldn’t be facing it alone.

---

The door didn’t creak. That was the part Eleanore would remember most clearly afterward. How silently it opened, how there was no warning at all before the shift in the air told her something was wrong.

She woke first, some instinct dragging her out of sleep half a second before she needed it to. The room was dark, the curtains drawn the way Caelestis always kept them, and for a moment she thought she’d simply imagined the sound. Then she saw the shape standing at the foot of the bed, and every nerve in her body went cold at once.

"Lady Adena?"

The voice that answered wasn’t right. It came out low, warped, layered with something underneath it that didn’t belong to any human throat. "Give me back what belongs to me."

Eleanore barely had time to process the words before Adena moved, fast, far too fast, closing the distance in a single unnatural lurch, knife raised and glinting faintly in the dim light. Eleanore scrambled back against the headboard on instinct, a scream catching somewhere in her throat as Adena’s knee hit the mattress and she climbed forward with jerking, wrong movements, like something was operating her limbs from a distance and hadn’t quite learned the rhythm of a human body yet.

"Adena, stop—"

The knife came down.

It never reached her. Caelestis’s arm shot out and caught the knife mid-strike, blood oozing out of his palm. He wrenched the knife sideways with enough force that it clattered uselessly onto the floorboards. He hauled her off the bed bodily, putting himself immediately between her and Eleanore, and it was only then, in the pale moonlight slipping through the gap in the curtains, that Eleanore saw her face properly.

Her eyes had gone completely black. No white, no iris, just deep, empty voids that reflected no light at all. Her mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a snarl and wasn’t quite a smile, and she thrashed against Caelestis’s grip with a strength that shouldn’t have belonged to someone her size.

"Give it back," she hissed again, voice splitting oddly, as though two voices were speaking through the same mouth at slightly different times. "It’s mine. It was always supposed to be mine."

"Eleanore, the door — now!" Caelestis barked, struggling to keep Adena pinned as she clawed and twisted against him with feral, uncoordinated violence.

Eleanore didn’t need telling twice. She scrambled off the bed and threw the door open, shouting down the hallway for anyone, anyone at all, and within moments the house had erupted into chaos. The guards pouring in, staff woken from sleep, and finally Victor, arriving at a dead run with his shirt half-buttoned and expression grim the second he took in the scene.