The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 499

Chapter 499

Dominic’s POV

I woke up with my face against stone and a sweet taste sitting in the back of my throat.

I couldn’t remember why I had fallen asleep to begin with. My brain was slow to catch up, like everything that had happened in the past ten minutes-or was it longer? Hours? Days? I couldn’t be sure-was a distant blur, a tiny point on the horizon that had no shape and made no sense.

All I remembered was…

The tunnel.

I shoved myself upright so fast the room tilted. The gap in the corner was still choked with rubble, exactly the way it had been when-

When what?

I dug for the memory. Dust. Shouting her name. Bastian clawing at the rocks beside me. And then there was a hole in my head where the rest should have been.

“Ellie?” I called out through the bond. “Ellie, where are you?”

There was no answer. But I could feel her there, distant, just like it always was. Even when we were hundreds of miles apart for weeks on end, before Vivian tried to snap the bond away, I could always feel her presence on the other side of that slender silver thread that bound us.

It was the same now. Ellie was alive-I knew that much. And if my memory served me, then she was probably still on the other side of that wall, probably trying to get through.

“Bastian.”

He was face-down beside me. I grabbed his shoulder and shook. He came up swinging, and I just barely managed to lean out of the way before his fist struck the side of my face.

“I told you, I don’t want-”

“Bastian!”

He froze. Blinked. Stared at me.

“What,” he rasped, “happened?”

“You tell me.”

He looked at the collapsed tunnel. Worked his jaw. “We were digging. And then…”

“And then nothing.”

“Bad air, maybe. From the collapse.” He didn’t sound convinced. Neither was I. Something was wrong here.

But Ellie mattered more than a gap in my memory right now. I was reaching for my axe, ready to start digging again, when Bastian grabbed my arm.

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Bastian frowned. “Who?”

Her eyes came to me.

“Ellie.”

The word struck me like an arrow in the chest.

“She was raving mad,” Stephanie said. “Her pupils were huge. She was eating some kind of… some kind of mushroom, I think. I don’t know. She was talking to herself, and when she heard me call out to her, she rushed at me and bit me.”

Stephanie held up her hand. The tip of her ring finger was mangled, bitten nearly through, bone sticking out of the torn flesh.

“Then, she picked up a rock,” Stephanie said, gesturing to her head. “She hit me, and I passed out right here. Did she attack you too?”

“No,” Bastian murmured, furrowing his brow. He looked at me. “I mean… I honestly don’t remember.”

“Ellie wouldn’t do that,” I said firmly.

“She ate something down here. Whatever it was took her mind with it,” Stephanie said.

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