Brute 188

 

Chapter 188 

ATASHA’S POV 

“Where is he?” I asked, my heartbeat shooting through the roof as I looked at Prince Kaelith. 

“He is…” 

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. 

Whatever Kaelith was about to say didn’t matter, because the moment I stepped past him I felt it, faint at first, like a whisper at the edge of my awareness, then stronger with every step I took toward the door. It was not the bond he had cut between us, not that clean, sharp line we once shared. It was something else. A steady rhythm pulsing just ahead of me. A heartbeat I knew better than my own. 

Cassian. 

He was alive and he was close. I could feel him. 

My bare feet hit the floor harder than I intended as I ran out into the corridor. Kaclith said something behind me, but his voice faded the moment I saw the next door. I didn’t need him to point me anywhere, because every part of me pulled toward that room like a rope had been tied around my chest and fastened to whatever was waiting beyond it. 

I didn’t knock. My hand closed around the handle and shoved the door open. 

Then… I saw him. 

Cassian was inside. 

He was facing the window, broad shoulders tense under his coat. Elder Agape stood near his side, hands folded, while Lucas stood a step back, speaking in a low voice that cut off the instant the door banged against the wall. Three heads turned toward me at once, but I barely registered the other two. 

My eyes went straight to him. 

He was on his feet. He was breathing, alive. His skin held color, his chest rose and fell evenly, and there was no blood on his lips. For one suspended moment, all I could do was stand there in the doorway, gripping the frame so hard my fingers hurt, as my brain tried to catch up with what my eyes were seeing. 

He wasn’t collapsed in the snow. He wasn’t choking on his own blood. He was upright and alive, and breathing in front of 

I felt the burn at the back of my eyes before I felt the first tear. 

Cassian’s gaze found mine. Whatever Lucas had been reporting died in his throat. Agape’s expression shifted in a way I couldn’t read and didn’t care to understand. Cassian held my stare for a few heavy seconds that stretched longer than they should have. 

Then his voice cut through the room. 

“Leave us.” 

Almost immediately, Lucas straightened at once, gave a short nod that barely brushed the edge of my awareness, and stepped out, brushing past me on his way to the corridor. Elder Agape’s eyes lingered on me for a moment, as if searching for something on my face, then he bowed his head toward Cassian and followed Lucas without a word. 

The door clicked shut behind them, and suddenly it was just the two of us. 

For a heartbeat, I stayed where I was, frozen in place by the rush of relief and the echo of the nightmare I. id just come from. It hit me all at once, until now, I could still hear the last sound of him struggling to breathe. 

Then, my body moved before my mind did. 

I crossed the room faster than I realized. The sword at my side bumped against my leg, but I barely felt it. One moment there was space between us and in the next I collided with his chest hard enough that the air left my lungs. My arms went around him without hesitation, wrapping tight around his torso as if I could anchor him to me with sheer force. 

He was solid. He was warm, like every other alive being. 

My head pressed against his chest, and the beat beneath my ear almost broke me. That sound had been missing out there in the courtyard, buried under the wet coughs and the rush of panic. Now it thudded against my cheek like proof that he had not been taken from me, that whatever had dragged me under had not dragged him with it. 

The tears I had been holding back spilled over. 

They ran hot down my face, soaking into his shirt as my fingers fisted in the fabric at his back. I tried to hold them in, to calm my breathing, but every breath came out uneven, half-sob, half-laugh, trapped somewhere between wanting to scream at him and wanting to sink into him and never let go. 

“You’re alive,” I heard myself say, the words muffled against his chest. “You’re alive. I thought you… I thought I lost you.” 

My shoulders shook, and the more I tried to steady myself, the worse it got. All the fear I had shoved down while fighting my way out of the mansion, while tearing through Yara’s soldiers, while kneeling in the snow and shoving my healing into a body that wouldn’t respond, clawed its way back up and refused to be buried again. 

“I couldn’t fix it,” I choked out, fingers tightening as if he might vanish if I loosened them even a little. “You were… just there … and nothing worked, and then Kaelith said you were corrupted, and I thought that was it. I thought that was the last time I would ever see you breathe.” 

My voice cracked on the last word, and I drew in a rough breath that hurt all the way down, the memory of that drowning still clinging to the inside of my lungs. 

The fear sat there, the kind that didn’t fade just because the danger had technically passed. I had seen too many bodies in the last hours, too many eyes staring at nothing, too many lives snapped like threads. The idea of Cassian becoming one of them had dug its nails into me, and even now, holding him, I couldn’t shake the image completely. 

I pressed myself closer, as if I could shield him from everything that had already happened. 

“I thought I was too late,” I whispered, because that was the worst part. “I thought I would wake up and you would already be gone.” 

The relief of feeling him breathing, standing, alive under my hands mixed with that lingering terror until it became something swollen and messy that I couldn’t neatly separate. All I knew was that the space where he stood right now was the only place in the room where my lungs felt like they could work at all. 

I held onto him as if letting go might prove this was some cruel trick. 

“Shhh…” I heard him say. 

Cassian’s hand came up slowly, almost cautiously, as if he wasn’t sure I would let him touch me. His fingers threaded into my hair, sliding through the tangled strands, and the warmth of his palm settled against the back of my head. He stroked gently, each movement dragging a little more of the panic out of my chest. 

“Shhh…” he murmured again. “It’s done now. Everything is done.” 

His other hand moved to my back, not pulling me away, just holding me there like he needed to feel that I was real as much as I needed to feel the same about him. My breath shook against his chest, and he kept stroking my hair, his fingers tracing 

paths that eased the tightness in my shoulders inch by inch. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into the top of my head. The apology caught me offguard. “For all of it. For what you saw. For what I put you through. For leaving you there while I-” 

“You don’t have to-” I started, but he tightened his hold faintly, not enough to stop me, just enough to make it clear he wasn’t done. 

“Yes, I do,” he said. 

I pulled back just enough to see his face. His eyes searched mine, the certainty gone, replaced by something quieter, something almost unsure. He looked alive, yes, but he also looked like a man who had seen the line he almost crossed and realized how much it mattered. 

I could’ve said what I would have said months ago, when I was still trying to earn a place in his world, when every bone in my body bent to avoid conflict with him. 

There’s nothing to apologize for. 

But that version of me was gone, burned out of existence somewhere between my arrival in the north and the blood, soaked courtyard. 

So instead, I sniffed, wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand, and said the first thing that came naturally. 

“As you should,” I told him, lifting my chin just a little. “I deserve an apology.” 

His brows rose, not in offense, but almost in relief, as if that answer made far more sense to him than anything soft I could’ve said. 

I pressed on, refusing to let the moment turn too gentle too fast. “But I’m not forgiving you that easily.”