Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Rook never had any goals apart from staying alive.
But now she has a few…
Find a way to bring Lucien back.
Figure out a way to survive the ascension.
And somehow become the first bonded pair to become immortal.
Lucien only has one goal.
Wage war on fate and win…
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Playlist
Fall Out Boy - Centuries
Imagine Dragons - Natural
My Immortal - Evanescence
Within Temptation - Fire and Ice
The Night We Met – Lord Huron
Death Cab For Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark
Alice Cooper - Poison
Imagine Dragons - Battle cry
Sleep Token - The Love You Want
Muse - Madness
Prologue
THEY SAY THE GREATEST FORCE ON Earth is love.
It can heal and destroy. Create and annihilate.
It can also turn mortal into immortal because love never dies.
But what if you’re no longer human?
What if the power you were never meant to wield breaks apart the very bones you were born with?
Do the old rules still apply?
Or does it mean you’re no longer part of this world?
And what happens if you accidentally destroy it?
Chapter One
WINTER ROSE FROM NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE.
A scream of wind.
A blast of cold—
Power tore out of me—viciously cruel and dangerously strong, ripping across the burning mountains, hurling icicles, smiting snow, delivering extinction to everything it touched.
Lucien’s hell didn’t stand a chance as ice clawed over flaming rock, frost surged over rivers of magma, and the entire night shocked white as winter stole everything—ending the lives of a million fires with a single exhale.
For one fragile heartbeat, I felt monstrously powerful.
I balanced the scales of destruction Lucien had unleashed and proved I was his perfect opposite, but...that fleeting triumph crumbled instantly, replaced by a grief so deep, it felt as if my soul was carved out with a rusty spoon.
Grief.
Bone-breaking, soul-tearing grief because he’d left me.
Left me!
“Don’t you dare do this!” Flinging myself on Lucien’s corpse by my knees, I balled my hands and struck him. “Wake up!” I punched him over and over, wanting to tear apart that despicable piece of metal in his chest. Each strike cracked something deeper inside me. Every blow was a plea, a prayer, a curse. “Wake up! Come back. Wake up!”
Without him, I wasn’t capable of holding back the ice.
Without him, I would die.
I could feel it rising, building, snarling. A raging apocalypse...a catastrophe that would plummet the world into an icy coffin.
“You don’t get to leave me!” I struck him again. “You’re not allowed, do you hear me? I forbid it. I need you.” I slapped his cheek, sending his head snapping to the side. “Open your damn eyes! Don’t you dare do this. I won’t let you do this. You can’t!”
He couldn’t abandon me.
He couldn’t just suddenly unexist.
I hated him.
Hated that I couldn’t find him, save him, keep him.
And the longer he was gone...the longer his heart didn’t beat...the worse my power became. It didn’t just open its eyes, it stretched and yawned and prepared for war.
Was this what Lucien had felt when he’d succumbed to his fire’s wrath? This level of agony as it built and built and built?
“Lucien!”
He was my balance.
The only force keeping my body from utterly destroying itself.
“Please, Luxin!”
He didn’t respond to either name.
Didn’t open his eyes or blend his blood with mine so we could reverse this awful nightmare.
He just...left me.
Wrath and horror and heartbreak splintered my frozen bones as the world continued to smoke and shatter.
The icy power no longer wanted to share my body. It wanted all of it. All of me.
With a howl of arctic rage, it crested and swallowed me.
I screamed as my heart became a glacier. My veins solidified, my blood crystallised, and my organs became lumps of frosty glass.
I gagged. I cried. I tried to fight—
Another blizzard tore free, tearing toward the stars and ricocheting outward with a storm of icy knives. Silver blood sprayed from my lips. I coughed and choked, quaking beneath pain. I coughed again, raining Lucien in sterling droplets as he lay dead and smoking on the ground.
I folded forward as ice webbed outward beneath my knees, blanketing the earth. I moaned in despair as every tree became a twinkling statue—every burning rock and bramble nothing more than a snow-covered relic.
I screamed again as the ice kept building, building, carving through my veins and tearing through my flesh. Jagged lightning bolts carved their way through my skin, matching the shards tearing through the sky.
I jerked as the power evolved and twisted. I could smell death again. I tasted all the lives that’d ended and knew where every bone rested. The world was littered with mementos and pieces of those who were loved and lost. I felt them decaying. I knew why they’d died and how long they’d been gone.
And the ice fed on those remnants.
It hunted down the whispers of their memories and drank on the tiny echoes of their energy, feeding me, hurting me, driving me closer and closer toward the very death so many had already suffered.
My body contorted as another scream tore through my throat. It became all-consuming, blinding, shoving me into a grave already lined thick with snow.
My broken bones turned to dust beneath the pressure.