Chapter one -the dance of Broken stars

The rain fell in slow, deliberate sheets, soaking the stone streets of Varrow’s End until they gleamed like black glass. Beneath the skeletal remains of an abandoned cathedral, Seraphina waited, her crimson cloak clinging to her like a second skin. Every heartbeat echoed in the hollowness of the night, and every breath tasted of iron and storm.

She told herself she wasn’t afraid.

She lied.

He would come for her. He always did.

The first time she saw Lucien Thorne, he had been draped in midnight — a man woven from shadows and the scent of winter roses. His touch had been a curse and a cure, and when he spoke her name, the world seemed to fracture beneath the weight of it.

“Seraphina…”

The memory of it made her knees weaken even now.

A flicker of movement. A whisper brushing the edge of her mind. She turned — and he was there.

Lucien stood a few paces away, water dripping from his raven-black hair, the jagged scar across his cheek catching the faint light like a blade. His eyes — gods, his eyes — were darker than the night itself, filled with the kind of hunger that could ruin worlds.

“You ran from me,” he said softly, a voice half-mocking, half-wounded.

“I had to,” Seraphina breathed. “You would have destroyed me.”

Lucien smiled, slow and cruel. “And yet here you are… begging for the destruction only I can give.”

She hated how her body betrayed her, how her heart raced and her blood sang at his words. How even now, after everything — after the blood and the betrayals — part of her wanted to be ruined by him.

He stepped closer, and the night itself seemed to tighten around them, a cocoon of shadow and desire. His hand rose, rough fingertips brushing her jawline, tilting her face up to his.

“You belong to me, Seraphina,” he murmured against her trembling mouth. “You always have.”

And when his lips crashed against hers — brutal, possessive, devastating — she knew she was lost. She had been lost the moment she looked into his abyss and thought she could survive it.

Seraphina didn’t know if it was the cold or Lucien’s nearness that made her tremble. His kiss had seared her, branding her deeper than any iron could. And yet, when he pulled back, it wasn’t lust or rage that darkened his gaze — it was something infinitely more dangerous.

Possession.

“You don’t get to leave again,” he said, voice low and rough, as if it scraped against the broken ribs of the night. His fingers tightened around her wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to remind her of the strength he could unleash if he chose.

Seraphina’s throat tightened. Part of her screamed to fight — to run.

But a far quieter voice whispered: Stay. Stay and burn.

“I never belonged to you,” she said, though the words felt false the moment they left her mouth.

Lucien’s smile was a shadowy thing, a blade wrapped in silk. “You did the moment you touched my darkness and decided you could survive it.”

To be continued.

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