The night reeked of iron and moonlight.
Serena Hawton stood at the edge of the glass bridge, her reflection fractured by ripples in the water far below. The kingdom of Eryndale slept behind her — towers of silver stone and shadowed spires whispering the kind of secrets that could get a person killed.
And somewhere in that sleeping city, **Xaiden Dilph** was awake. Watching. Waiting.
He always was.
Once, they had stood side by side — two prodigies of rival Houses, both too proud and too reckless to bow to one another. The Hawtons ruled the sky with their stormcraft; the Dilphs, the land with their shadowbinding. Peace between them was nothing more than a thread — and Serena had cut it the day she'd stolen the Crown of Thorns from under Xaiden's nose.
She hadn't expected to see him again so soon.She hadn't expected her blood to remember him — or her heart to betray her this easily.The sound of footsteps echoed down the bridge, smooth and deliberate. A chill curled around her throat before his voice found her.
"You've been busy, Hawton," Xaiden drawled, his tone sharp enough to draw blood. "I was almost beginning to miss your treachery."
Serena didn't turn. "I'd call it strategy. You always confuse the two."
"Strategy doesn't burn half a court to the ground."
"Then perhaps you should have built it stronger."
A pause — long enough for her to feel his presence behind her. The air around Xaiden always shifted, thickened, as if the shadows bent to listen. He was the kind of danger one didn't look at directly, the kind that smiled as he twisted the knife.
When she finally faced him, his silver eyes gleamed with something between fury and fascination. His cloak bled darkness onto the marble floor. He looked exactly as he had the night everything fell apart — the same cruel grace, the same cold beauty, the same temptation that tasted like regret.
"You stole something that wasn't yours," he said.
"So did you," she murmured. "My peace. My brother. My crown."Lightning trembled across the horizon — a warning from the gods or perhaps from her own power, which had always been a little too wild, a little too much like her heart.
Xaiden took a step closer. "You think this war will end with one of us winning?"
"No," Serena said softly. "It'll end with both of us destroyed."
And yet — as the storm broke open above them — she couldn't stop staring at his mouth. At the way his fury trembled with something dangerously close to longing.
Somewhere deep inside her, a truth whispered like prophecy:
*He will be your ruin. And you will be his salvation.*
The first raindrop struck the bridge. Then another. By the time the lightning flared again, Xaiden was gone — vanished into the storm he had once taught her to love.
Serena exhaled shakily, closing her eyes against the wind. The crown pulsed beneath her cloak, alive and waiting, just like the ache she couldn't name.
She knelt down, cursing her generation, for sluicing revenge down her blood, her veins, she never wanted a war, a peaceful life instead, but all the odds were against.
There once was a war too deadly to be remembered without trembling. It began with a whisper between kings and ended with silence across nations. Golden fields turned to ash, rivers ran black, and cities that once sang with laughter became nothing more than mausoleums for dreams. The sky itself wept fire, and the gods — if they were listening — turned away. From the bones of that ruin rose those who survived, scarred but unbroken, carrying both the curse and the hope of what had been lost.
Tears escaped her eye as she painfully said" not this, not again".
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War was coming.
And love — the dark, merciless kind — had already begun.
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