Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 42

[Kira’s POV]

The throne room was burning.

I stood at the center of it, barefoot on stone that radiated heat like a furnace, and watched both thrones consume themselves in smoke.

The flames moved wrong—too deliberate, too purposeful, eating through ancient stone with the patience of something sentient.

Damon lay at my feet.

His eyes were open, staring at nothing, and the silver light of the twin bond was gone. Not dimmed. Not muted. Just gone.

Then I saw Malik.

His body was broken against the far wall, crumpled at an angle that told me bones had shattered on impact.

His dark eyes were closed. Blood traced a path from his temple to his jaw, and his chest didn’t move. Didn’t rise. Didn’t fall.

I looked down at my hands.

They were covered in blood. Not red—silver, luminous, dripping with magic that destroyed everything it touched. Where the drops hit stone, the floor cracked and blackened.

The magic wasn’t leaking from me—it was hemorrhaging, and as I watched my own hands destroy the throne room, I understood with a clarity that felt like a blade between my ribs—I did this. I killed them.

I screamed—

And woke to darkness and the sound of my own voice tearing through the chamber like something wounded.

Malik’s arms were already around me, his voice in my ear—low, steady. It’s not real. You’re safe. I’m here. Breathe, Kira. Just breathe.

I couldn’t breathe. My body was shaking so violently my teeth chattered. Then I saw the room.

Every candle in the chamber had melted. Not burned down—melted, reduced to pools of liquid wax pooling on the stone floor like spilled blood.

The curtains around the bed were singed, smoke still rising in thin, ghostly threads. I did this. In my sleep.

Through the bond—faint, three corridors away, pulled from his own sleep by the shockwave of my terror—Damon reached for me.

Sister?

The word arrived wrapped in alarm so sharp it cut through the haze of my panic. I could feel him already moving, already throwing off his covers, his feet hitting cold stone.

I’m fine. I pushed the words back through the bond with every scrap of composure I could scrape together, which wasn’t much. Go back to sleep, Damon. It was just a nightmare.

A pause. Through the connection, I felt him stop mid-stride. Felt him reading what I was sending against what he’d actually felt rip through the bond seconds ago—the raw, screaming terror, the magic detonating outward, the smell of smoke that wasn’t just in my room but in his mind too.

That wasn’t just a nightmare, Kira.

Please. My throat was too tight to speak aloud and too tight to think straight, but I pushed the word at him anyway, brittle and desperate. Malik is here. I’m safe. Please just—I can’t have you see this right now. I can’t.

Another pause. Longer this time, heavy with everything he wanted to say and the restraint it cost him not to say it. I felt his feet still on the cold corridor floor. Felt the war between the brother who needed to come and the twin who understood that sometimes dignity was the only thing left to hold.

I’m here if you need me. Three corridors. I’m not going back to sleep.

Then the bond quieted—not closed, never closed, just drawn back to give me the space I’d asked for. But I could feel him there, a steady presence in the dark, standing sentinel from a distance because I’d asked him to and he loved me enough to listen even when listening was harder than running.

I wrenched out of Malik’s arms to stare at him, my eyes racing over his body, searching for damage.

He kissed my forehead before continuing. “And if none of them have the answers, then we go further—other territories, other traditions, other sources. Someone, somewhere, knows how this works. There has to be someone.”

I wanted to believe him. But the scorch marks on the walls stared back at me in the moonlight.

The magic wasn’t waiting for me to find a teacher. It was escalating on its own schedule, fed by emotions I couldn’t suppress and triggered by dreams I couldn’t control.

“Maybe you shouldn’t sleep here anymore,” I said, and the words tasted like broken glass.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near me until I figure this out. Tonight it was a ripped shirt, Malik. Tomorrow it could be—”

I swallowed hard. “I can’t be the thing that kills you. I won’t survive that. I’d rather lose you to distance than lose you to a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

He didn’t say anything, but told me everything I needed to know through actions.

His grip on me tightened, telling me he wasn’t going anywhere. Not now, not ever. I curled against his chest, pressing my ear to his heartbeat.

His arms came around me as he held me in the wreckage of a room my own power had nearly destroyed.

I’d reclaimed what was stolen. But I’d never learned to wield it. Never been taught the foundations, the discipline, the framework that turns raw power into controlled force.

What happens when I lose control completely?

What happens when the nightmare becomes real, and the people I love become the casualties of a power I never asked for and can’t put down?

The magic pulsed beneath my skin, restless and hungry, and I held onto Malik and had no answer at all.