The air collapses.
For a heartbeat, every sound in the chamber drops away—and in that silence, I finally understand what's happening.
I didn’t need the potion.
The power rising in me doesn’t feel borrowed or brewed. It feels ancient. Familiar. Like a door that’s been waiting for years for someone—me—to turn the handle. Light floods my vision—white,molten, absolute.
It bursts open.
Heat ignites along my spine, racing upward. My lungs seize, not in fear, but in recognition, as if every cell has been waiting for this command.
Everything around me starts to fade as the transporter completes his duty.
My sin power roars to life inside me as everything turns black.
Epilogue
Arwen
The world doesn’t come back all at once. It rebuilds itself in violent fragments—noise, breath, gravity—like a book slammed shut and then pried open again. My eyes stay closed, but I feel everything shifting, sliding, reassembling around me. The floor is solid under my spine. Cold. Unforgiving.
Not sand.
Not heat.
Not the Wastes I expected.
As I try to open my eyes, I feel a familiar weight. A hand is on my shoulder.
Atticus.
My heart stutters. I force my eyes open, vision swimming, and drag myself toward him. In the mess of my new bond, powers awakening and exile, I didn't notice he had stayed with me.
His body is laying prone beside me, limbs heavy. Pale, slack, too still. My pulse hammers in my ears as I fumble a hand under his nose.
Warm breath ghosts across my fingertips.
Alive.
Breath catches in my throat, relief washing through me so hard my shoulders tremble. I press a shaking hand to his cheek, whisper his name like it might anchor us both.
Then the rest of the room sharpens.
Bars.
Steel bars, thick..
A small square chamber made of carved stone. A bolted bunk bed with thin mattresses. A tiny adjoining bathroom with stainless-steel fixtures, too clean and polished to belong in exile.
This is not the Wastes. This is a cell.
My stomach drops, cold and fast. Why? Who would—
A sharp ache snaps through me like a blade driven straight into my sternum.
The bond.Maddox.
The proximity bond, newly sealed with mixed blood and everything we didn’t say, slams into me with unbearable force. It curls in my chest like a burning wire dragged tight between us. Distance hits like pain. Too far.
