A muscle jumped in his jaw, tension radiating off him in silent waves. “What do you mean, you can’t do ithere?”
“I mean…” I swallowed hard, feeling the intensity of his stare. “My haze… It’s traceable in here. If I project it inside any Metasphere and the Radicals happen to have a LiaPrism, they’ll detect it, and realize my translation is different.”
The room fell into a tense silence, Caden’s expression darkening with each passing second. “And you didn’t think to tell me this before?” he asked, his voice dangerously low.
“I was going to?—”
“Save it,” he snapped, cutting me off. “You’re done. You’re never going on another mission again.”
Without waiting for a response, Caden turned and stormed out of the room, leaving me standing there, the sting of his words still hanging in the air. The door slammed shut behind him.
Fuck.
TWENTY-EIGHT
CADEN
Unfuckingbelievable.
How in the name of all the hells, did she think she could go on a mission with us while hiding somethingthatcritical? She’d jeopardized everything—and everyone—because she couldn’t bring herself to trust us with the truth.
I stormed down the stairs, while my frustration burned hotter with every step. Letting her join the team had been an epic mistake—one I was now paying for in spades. What the hell had possessed me to ever think this was a good idea?
I cursed myself the entire way to the portal, where Sean stood waiting. The look on his face was a cocktail of concern and confusion—he could clearly tell I was seconds from detonation.
“Ye okay there, man?” he asked, cautiously.
“Emma’s translation is traceable inside the Metasphere,” I snapped, the words clipped and bitter. “And she never fucking told us.”
Sean’s eyes went wide in disbelief. “What? How the fuck is that possible?”
I shrugged, sharp and impatient. “Don’t know, don’t care. We need to deal with Petru first.”
Without waiting for him to respond, I jumped through the portal to Slava, hoping the change of scenery would somehow help me leave my anger behind. But even as I emerged on the other side, the bitterness from my fight with Emma clung to me like a second skin.
With my jaw still tight, I took in the rugged landscape of Romania, the human territory encircling Slava. The whole Collective lived within a single fortress that seemed to claw its way out of the cliffs of Ciucaru Mic.
Towering above even the surrounding mountains, the structure loomed like a monument to dominance—its spires jagged and unnatural, rising high into the pale daylight like the bones of some ancient beast. It wasn’t built for elegance. It was built to last.
The Danube roared far below, carving its way through the steep valley like a warning. The burg was impossibly high, carved into the uppermost reaches of the rock, its foundation fused with the mountain itself. From here, no one could approach unseen. Not across the cliffside. Not by river. Not through the forest, where gnarled trees twisted toward the sky like scorched fingers and underbrush thickened into a natural barrier.
Only a single, winding path cut toward the outer watchtower—narrow, steep, and exposed at every angle.
No one entered Slava by accident. And no one entered it alone.
Every time I visited this place, the sight of it sent a chill through me. The raw beauty of the land clashed with the undercurrent of something darker, something embedded in its very soil.
Every weathered stone, every twisted tree felt as though it pulsed with the energy of the fallen—magi who had bled, fought, and died to keep this place standing.
As we neared the border between the Human World and Slava, we manifested our Nexuses, the flickering drops confirming our clearance through the Layers of Protection.
The moment I stepped into the Metasphere, my energy stirred, a slow, familiar surge humming beneath my skin. My haze came alive, swirling around us, instinctively reacting, sensing. It coiled, ready, as if it knew better than to trust the silence.
And then, we approached Petru’s home.
And just like the last time I stood before it, I felt the same unshakable truth settle in.
This was not a place for the weak.
