[BL] I Didn't Sign Up For This Chapter 43: In Which the World Hears Us

I didn’t sleep.

Not even close.

I lay in the dark beside Azryth, listening to his breathing, feeling the steady rhythm of his heartbeat through the binding, and tried very hard to do what I’d told him to do.

’Don’t think about it.’

But I failed spectacularly.

The prophecy kept circling back in my mind, over and over, like a song stuck in my head except infinitely worse. *The fractured key and the bound lord will either lock the gates or tear them open.* Lock or tear, save or destroy, and hanging in the middle of those two options like a knife’s edge: *all hangs on whether love proves true or love proves false.*

I believed our love was real. I did. When I’d said it earlier, I’d ant every word, our love is true, we’ll be fine.

But that was before three AM, when the rest of my brain decided to have a full-on mutiny.

What if it’s not enough?

The thought crept in quiet and cold, and once it started, it wouldn’t stop.

What if loving Azryth isn’t enough to lock the gates? What if the prophecy requires sothing more, sothing deeper, sothing we haven’t figured out yet?

We’d been together for weeks. Weeks. Against centuries of cosmic history and ancient prophecies written by beings who understood reality in ways I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

What if weeks of love, no matter how real, just isn’t enough?

I turned onto my side, facing away from Azryth, pressing my face into the pillow.

The binding humd between us, warm and present, stronger than it had ever been. Stronger than it had any right to be after... after our first ti together, after what we’d done, what we’d shared, the barriers we’d broken down.

That was the other thing keeping awake.

The binding had changed significantly. I could feel it in ways I hadn’t before, like soone had turned up the volu on a radio that had previously been playing at background noise. Every emotion Azryth felt, every shift in his awareness, every dream that flickered through his sleeping mind, I could sense it all closer, louder, and more present.

And the sigil.

I lifted my wrist in the dark, examining it. The mark that had been relatively quiet for days, pulsing gently in rhythm with my heartbeat, barely noticeable unless I actively looked for it, was doing sothing new.

Flaring.

Not constantly. In pulses. Bright amber bursts that lit up my skin every few minutes, synchronized with nothing I could identify, not my heartbeat, not my breathing, but sothing else, sothing deeper.

The prophecy had done sothing too, or maybe the prophecy had just revealed what was already happening. Since the binding strengthened, since that night, the sigil had been restless. Like it was responding to sothing I couldn’t hear.

I pressed my palm flat against it, feeling the pulse beneath my skin.

What if Azryth stops loving ?

The thought arrived unbidden and hit like ice water.

Not because I doubted him, I didn’t. I’d felt his love through the binding, raw and fierce and terrified and real. But the prophecy didn’t care about what we felt right now, it cared about what we felt always, forever. An eternal, unshakeable, never-wavering love that could anchor the fate of two entire realms.

What if that’s impossible? What if love, even real love, isn’t built to carry that kind of weight?

What if one day, years from now, decades, the binding dulls and the feelings shift and we beco sothing comfortable but not passionate and the prophecy reads that as false and the gates tear open and millions of people die because Riven Kael and Azryth Valek stopped being in love?

My breath was coming too fast, I forced myself to slow it down, pressing my hand harder against the sigil.

What if I’m not enough?

What if I never was?

The sigil flared again, brighter this ti, bright enough that I could see the amber glow through my closed eyelids when I squeezed my eyes shut.

Sothing shifted inside my chest. Not pain exactly. Pressure. Like the binding was responding to the storm of thoughts and emotions churning through , amplifying each one, reflecting it back doubled.

Fear, love, terror, hope. The desperate need to protect Azryth, to keep him safe, to make sure that whatever happened, he survived it. The equally desperate fear that protecting him might an losing him, because locking the gates might an sealing him away forever, and what good was saving the world if the world didn’t have him in it?

The emotions crashed together, colliding, building on each other in a feedback loop I couldn’t control.

The binding surged.

Not the gentle hum I’d gotten used to, not even the sharp flare of strong emotion, this was a wave, massive and sudden, ripping outward from the center of my chest like a shockwave.

The sigil blazed so bright it hurt to look at. I gasped, curling in on myself, but the energy was already moving, already flowing through and out of simultaneously, pouring through the binding like water through a broken dam.

For one terrifying second, I couldn’t feel anything except the pulse. It drowned everything, my thoughts, my fear, my awareness of where I was or what was happening. It was just a raw, overwhelming energy expanding outward in every direction.

Then it was gone.

The wave passed, the sigil dimd back to its normal amber glow, the binding settled quieter, like it had released the pressure it had been holding.

I lay there breathing hard, hands shaking.

What the hell just happened?

Behind , I heard Azryth move.

Not the gradual stirring of soone waking from sleep, he was suddenly, completely alert, sitting up in one fluid motion. Through the binding I felt his awareness snap into sharp focus, every sense sharpening at once.

"Riven." His voice was rough with sleep but his mind was razor-clear. "What did you just do?"

"I didn’t do anything, I don’t know what—"

"You sent a pulse." He was already reaching for , his hand finding my shoulder in the dark. "A massive one. I felt it go out through the binding, it went through the wards, through everything."

"I wasn’t trying to.."

"I know." His hand moved to my wrist, fingers closing around the sigil, even in the dark I could feel the residual heat radiating from it. "The binding amplified an emotional surge, a very big one." A pause. "How long have you been awake?"

"All night."

"What? What were you thinking about?"

I didn’t answer imdiately. He already knew, he’d felt it through the binding, the fear, the spiraling thoughts, all of it.

"The prophecy," I said quietly. "What it ans, what happens if we’re not... if our love isn’t..."

"Stop." His voice was firm but not unkind. He shifted closer, pulling against his chest. "We’re not doing this right now."

"I can’t stop thinking about it."

"I know, but right now we have a more imdiate problem." His phone was already in his hand, screen glowing in the dark, he was reading sothing, scrolling fast. "The pulse went citywide."

I went cold. "What do you an citywide?"

"Electromagnetic disturbances across six districts. Blackouts, signal interference, traffic systems failing simultaneously." He set down the phone, his expression grim. "And that’s just what’s making the news."

"What do you an, ’just what’s making the news’?"

"The electromagnetic interference is a side effect. There are dozens of spirits responding to your pulse. They’re moving through the city right now, drawn toward us." He turned to face fully. "Humans can’t see them, but they can feel them, that wrongness people sense without being able to na it, that unease that makes them lock their doors and check over their shoulders for no reason."

My stomach dropped.

"Every supernatural entity within a hundred miles just felt exactly what you are," Azryth said quietly. "And exactly where you are."

"Oh god."

"The Covenant included."

I stared at him in the blue-white glow of his phone screen. The sigil on my wrist pulsed, steady and bright, completely indifferent to the fact that it had just painted a target on my back.

"I didn’t an to," I said, and hated how small my voice sounded.

"I know you didn’t." He pulled closer, his arm coming around . "The binding strengthened significantly after us... after that night. Our emotional output is amplified now, far more than either of us anticipated. Under normal circumstances, the wards would have contained it."

"But?"

"But that wasn’t a normal emotional output." His thumb traced slow circles on my arm. "That was months of suppressed anxiety, fear about the prophecy, existential dread, all of it hitting at once through a binding that’s three tis stronger than it was seventy-two hours ago." A pause. "The wards couldn’t hold it."

I pressed my face against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, feeling the binding hum between us. Quieter now, settled, like it had done what it needed to do and was perfectly content with the chaos it had caused.

"So every supernatural entity in the city just felt ," I said.

"Yes."

"And they know exactly what I am."

"Yes."

"That’s bad."

"It’s very bad." He was quiet for a long mont. "We need to discuss containnt protocols, and we need to do it quickly, because we’re not the only ones who felt that pulse."

Outside, sowhere far below us, the city was waking up to a morning that felt slightly wrong. The kind of wrong that people couldn’t na, couldn’t point to, could only sense in the back of their minds like a sound just below hearing.

Spirits drifted through streets they’d never touched before, invisible to the humans rushing past them, drawn upward like smoke toward a source they could finally, unmistakably locate.

Toward .