All Chapters of His Dark Reign: Chapter 51
- Chapter 60
130 chapters
48. Fractures in the Glass
The morning came too clean.Birds sang outside, the sunlight slanted gold through the half-drawn curtains, and for a few long seconds Adam thought it had all been a nightmare — the church, the light, the heat, Elena’s trembling body in his arms.Then he sat up.His chest hurt. His palms were blistered. The faint smell of smoke lingered on his bedsheet. He turned his hands over, staring at the faint spiral marks burned into the flesh — not scars, not quite sigils, but something in-between, like the skin was remembering fire.You’re lucky to be alive, Malrick murmured, his voice faint but recovering. She could have ended us both.“She’s not the same,” Adam said under his breath. “And neither am I.”He swung his legs out of bed. The room felt tilted. Every reflection — the mirror on his wardrobe, the phone screen, the window glass — seemed to shimmer just half a second too late when he moved. Like the world was lagging behind him.Downstairs, his mother was humming to the radio. Jake, th
49. Whispering Veil
Adam didn’t sleep that night.The house was too still. Too aware. Every tick of the wall clock seemed to echo inside his skull, magnified by the kind of silence that felt alive. The air was heavy — thick with something he couldn’t name, like invisible dust pressing down on his chest.He sat at his desk, his laptop glowing faintly before him, its screen still open to the church’s online archives. The page was half-filled with Latin phrases he couldn’t translate, words that made Malrick stir inside him.> “Not yet. Don’t read it aloud.”Malrick’s voice was faint — like static. “That text… it speaks to me. I know those names.”Adam’s reflection flickered in the dark screen. For a heartbeat, it wasn’t his face at all. Something older looked back — sharper, regal, and broken. When he blinked, it was gone.He turned off the screen and leaned back, eyes burning. He thought of Jake — his mother’s new boyfriend — the too-warm smile, the way his eyes never quite matched his tone. And the way he
50. Wrong god
The day moved like smoke—slow, gray, hard to breathe through.Adam could feel everyone’s eyes on him in the hall, whispering after what happened last week, but it was more than gossip. It was fear, thick enough to taste. Something in him—something that wasn’t quite human anymore—seemed to drink it in.He hadn’t slept. Not properly. Malrick’s voice never really stopped now; it throbbed behind his thoughts like a second pulse.“You’re not the same anymore, boy. You can feel it, can’t you? The pull. The hunger.”He’d slammed his head against the sink last night to silence the voice. It hadn’t helped. The mirror had cracked, and for a moment he’d sworn the reflection didn’t follow the motion—it smiled when he didn’t.He was still thinking about that when he felt Elena’s presence before he saw her. The faint perfume. The way the air shifted around her.She caught up to him near the old lockers by the west exit, a place that smelled of rust and lemon cleaner. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she
51. The scream in the dark
The echo of Elena’s scream cut through the night like a blade.Adam’s body moved before his mind did — sprinting out of the broken church, his boots crunching on the gravel, lungs burning with a strange, electric panic.The streets were empty, dead quiet except for the distant barking of dogs and the low moan of the wind. The red sky had faded to a bruised gray, but the color still clung to the edges of the clouds like old blood.“Elena!” he shouted. His voice bounced off the cold buildings and came back to him hollow. No answer.“You shouldn’t care,” Malrick whispered inside his skull, low and sharp. “She’s just noise — distraction. We have bigger prey.”“Shut up,” Adam hissed under his breath. But the voice only laughed, rich and velvety, dripping with something close to pleasure.“There it is again — that spark. Fear. Attachment. How human of you. Do you even remember why you started this, Adam?”He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His thoughts were a blur of light and sound and running
52. Whispers between worlds
The sound of Elena’s own footsteps was the only thing keeping her sane.Each one echoed too loudly in the empty streets, counting the seconds since she’d left Adam behind. She hadn’t wanted to — not really — but there was something in his eyes that made her skin crawl. A flicker of something vast and wrong. Something ancient.She couldn’t shake the image: the way the shadows seemed to follow him when he moved, the faint gleam in his irises that wasn’t there before. And that voice—No, she told herself, there was no voice. You’re tired, scared. You imagined it.But as she turned onto her street, the streetlights above her began flickering again, one by one, as though following her home. She hugged her coat tighter around herself and half-ran to her door.The house was dark, her mother asleep upstairs, oblivious. Elena closed the door, locked it twice, and leaned against it, heart pounding. She wanted to cry. Instead, she slid down to the floor and pressed her palms to her ears.Make it
53. The doorway between them
The last candle guttered out as the church doors creaked wider.Elena stood framed in the doorway, the rain behind her hissing against the threshold. Her hair clung damply to her face, and her eyes— they glowed faintly, a molten red threaded with gold, like embers trying to hide behind glass.For a moment, Adam forgot how to breathe.Everything—the charred altar, the half-collapsed pews, the fragments of mirror around him—blurred at the edges. All that remained was her and that impossible light.“Elena…” His voice cracked.She stepped inside, slow, deliberate, her boots echoing on the marble. The air trembled as though the church itself feared her arrival.“I think,” she said softly, “I saw something you were meant to hide.”The words hit him like a whisper through broken glass.He wanted to move toward her, to pull her out of that cursed place, but his body felt pinned by an unseen weight. Malrick’s voice coiled through his skull, low and warning.“She’s marked. Step back, Adam.”But
54. Tightened web
Rain fell in sheets as Adam half-dragged, half-carried Elena through the empty streets. Her head rested against his shoulder, pale and still.Each drop of water hit his skin like sparks, washing streaks of soot and dried blood from his hands.She stirred once, murmuring something that sounded like “the light is calling”, then went still again.Malrick was silent — eerily so.Usually the voice filled his mind like a low drumbeat, but now there was only the hollow rush of wind. Adam almost missed it. Almost.He reached the alley beside the bakery — Lilith’s father’s bakery — the only place with lights still on this late. The warm scent of bread drifted out into the storm, grounding him in a world that still made sense.He pushed open the door with his shoulder. “Help me,” he rasped to whoever was inside.Lilith appeared from behind the counter. Her usual dark hoodie was replaced by an oversized white sweater, her eyes widening at the sight before her — Adam soaked to the bone, Elena lim
55. Through the dark mirror
The world was made of whispers.Elena floated somewhere between waking and sleep, her body heavy, her mind caught in a web of voices that spoke in languages older than time.The dream—if it was a dream—began in the church again. Only this time, it wasn’t burned or broken. The stained-glass windows glowed with living light, showing scenes she didn’t recognize: winged figures chained to the ground, flames twisting into the shape of eyes.At the altar stood Jake.Not the smiling man her mother adored, but something behind that smile—cold, ancient, and familiar in a way that made her blood turn to frost.He was whispering in Latin, the same strange cadence that sometimes echoed in her mind when she was alone. A woman stood beside him. Elena’s breath caught.It was Lilith.She looked the same—dark hair, soft eyes—but there was something vast and hollow in her shadow, as if another presence moved within her skin.Jake turned toward Elena, and for a heartbeat his eyes weren’t human—they were
56. The echo that remembers
The mirror was cracked again.It always began with that—a faint fracture, a spiderweb line crawling across the glass like a heartbeat gone wrong.Lilith stared at her reflection in the motel bathroom, the cheap light flickering overhead, her fingers trembling against the porcelain sink. She could see herself… but not only herself.Behind her image, in the ghost-glass, something shimmered. A shadow, coiling and alive.“Not now,” she whispered.The reflection smiled back—soft, mocking, patient.Her chest rose and fell in uneven rhythm. She remembered the dream she’d had as a child, back when she still believed she was just human—when she used to wake up screaming because her shadow didn’t match her body’s movements.That was before the church found her.Before the Covenant carved their sigils into her skin and told her the truth.She was never born. She was made.A vessel — but not for Malrick. For his counterweight.The other half of his divided essence — the shard that once defied him
57. A pulse beneath the cathedral
The night felt wrong.The air itself shivered, a low, inaudible hum pressing behind her ears as Lilith walked toward the cathedral that loomed like a fossil of light and ruin. Storm-rain clung to her lashes; every step echoed against stone slick with moss.She didn’t remember deciding to come here.She only remembered the pull.Inside, the sanctuary was drowned in darkness, candles guttering under drafts that seemed to breathe. The marble saints had no faces. Beneath their feet, an iron stairway spiraled down into the crypt. The song that had lured her—a broken fragment of an old hymn—beat faintly from below.Lilith descended.Each step tasted of rust. The hymn grew clearer, layered with another sound: whispering. It wasn’t a voice she knew, yet her body reacted as if it were part of her own memory.“Still chasing ghosts?”Jake’s voice, calm and dry, from the base of the stairs. He stood beside an altar eaten with age, candles trembling around him. His eyes caught the light like w