Loren closed his eyes, desperate to deny it even as a sick, sinking weight settled in his chest. There was only one reason magic wove fae souls together in dreams. Even now, just thinking of her stirred something deep within him—power he hadn’t felt in years, flaring to life like an ember in the dark.
This female was his mate.
Loren curled his aching hands into fists. The absent Goddess was cruel, to dangle her before him now. In another life, he would have sought her out and courted her. He would have knelt at her feet and offered her every piece of himself—his heart, his magic, his name. Everything he had would have been hers.
But in this life?
He could never acknowledge her. Could never admit her existence. Not even if the power she granted him was enough to tip the balance. Because if the Arcanum ever learned he had a mate…
They’d use her. Weaponize her. Tear her apart, piece by piece, just to see what it did to him. And if they ever completed the bond...Goddess help him, he couldn’t be responsible for what they’d do to her.
He forced the thought away, shoving it into the depths of his mind and locking it away with all his other unbearable truths, alongside the memories of his parents, his sister, his friends—all the people he had loved and failed to protect.
The best thing he could do—for both of them—was forget she ever existed.
Loren had triedto die once.
In the beginning, there had been others here. He never saw them, but their voices echoed through the dungeon—cries of pain, defiance, and desperate pleas for mercy that would never come. They had been a grim comfort, proof that he wasn’t alone in his suffering.
But one by one, they fell silent.
At first, Loren was relieved. Their suffering had ended—one way or another. But as the years dragged on, the silence seeped into his mind, a creeping, corrosive thing that stripped away even the faintest semblance of hope.
His only companions were the shadows.
They came to him the night the last voice disappeared. A slow trickle of darkness, curling through the cracks in the walls, cold and watchful. He hadn’t understood what it meant—had thought, at first, that his father had come for him.
It wasn’t until days later, when they didn’t leave but no rescue came, that Loren understood.
His father was dead. And his shadows—the ones that always followed the fae crown—they belonged to Loren now.
But they didn’t obey him.
When he ordered them to free him, they just coiled around him, useless. They slunk into the corners of his cell when his tormenters came in, watching silently as they cut into his flesh and ripped away pieces of his sanity with their never-ending questions. And when they left him bleeding and broken on the filthy floor, theshadows only drifted over him, whispering things he didn’t understand.
Eventually, Loren stopped asking them to help and begged them to kill him instead. But still, they never did anything but whisper—and wait.
Years passed.
No more voices came. Loren had never realized it was possible to feel so hollow, to ache for connection so deeply it felt like a physical wound.
And so, he had decided to end it.
He had curled up on his filthy straw pallet and rejected the rancid scraps they slid into his cell. He had relished the slow unraveling of his body, waiting for his heart to still, for his breath to stop, for death to claim him.
But Garrick Shaw had come before death.
“How long has he been like this?”
Loren barely registered the sound of the cell door opening. But at the familiar voice, his eyes flickered open, sluggish and unfocused as he forced himself to look at the man who had betrayed them all.
The shadows, predictably, were nowhere to be found.
Garrick stood just inside the doorway, studying him with a mix of disdain and calculation. He had aged—fine lines fanning out around his sharp eyes, streaks of gray threading through his dark hair—but the arrogance in his stance, the chill in his gaze, remained unchanged.
Loren hated him.
“You’re wasting your time,” the guard muttered. “He’s given up.”
