WAR OF HEARTS ↠ KOL MIKAELSON [1]

2:15

| THE STAND:
CHAPTER FIFTEEN |

Rhea was on the verge of losing control.

Not just emotionally, but physically. Magically. Spiritually. Everything inside her was burning, unraveling, twisting too fast for her to hold.

Her boots hit the concrete of an abandoned street in the Garden District—empty, thank God. The streetlights above buzzed erratically, casting flickering halos of yellow light before they shattered one by one in her wake, glass raining onto the sidewalk with every tremor of power she couldn't suppress. Her magic was spilling out of her in waves. Raw, electric, wild.

She couldn't be near anyone. Not right now. Not in this state.

Not unless she wanted blood on her hands.

Her breaths came in short, panicked bursts, eyes wild and unfocused as she tried to force her feet toward her apartment. Toward anywhere that wasn't here. Each step forward was a battle between her will and the chaos trying to rip out of her.

She couldn't remember the last time she had felt this anxious. Not even when Kol died. Not even during Greece.

This—this was different.

Because she had seen her.

Her mother.

She was still trying to convince herself it had been a hallucination. A cruel trick of her shattered nerves and sleep-deprived mind. A phantom born from trauma and stress and the unbearable weight of the last few weeks.

But deep down?

She knew better.

A scream ripped from her throat—one filled with every fragment of fear and fury—and the windows of a parked car nearby exploded, glass spraying into the street in a shimmering arc. The sound was piercing. Violent. A sound that didn't belong to a person, but a force of nature unhinged.

A hand clamped down on her shoulder. For a split second—one suspended in horror and longing—she thought it was him.

Kol.

The man whose death had hollowed her out for the second time. The one who left behind a silence in her soul she had never filled.

But it wasn't him.

It was someone just as important.

"Rhea," Ares breathed, his voice raw with urgency and relief. "I've been looking everywhere for you."

She turned toward him slowly, as if not trusting her own senses. Her wide, tear-filled eyes drank him in—his familiar frame, his unruly hair, his ever-defiant stance. It felt like lifetimes had passed since they last stood together, even if it had only been weeks.

Their last conversation still echoed in the air between them—heavy, jagged, unresolved.

Ares studied her face, and something shifted in his expression—recognition, maybe. Understanding. Pain.