She watches me, her expression unreadable, as I pull off my top layers, until I’m wearing just my bra. The air in the room is cool, raising goosebumps on my arms. I feel exposed, not just physically, but as if she can see the frayed edges of my soul.
Her hands are just as I remember them from childhood check-ups—cool, dry, and gentle. They find the pulse point on my wrist first. Her thumb presses down, and her brow furrows almost instantly. She holds the position for a long, silent moment, her eyes closed as if she’s listening to a story only my blood can tell.
“Your pulse is too fast,” she finally murmurs, her voice tight. “And your temperature… abnormally high.”
I say nothing. I knew she would feel it. The foreign heat that now lives in me, a low-burning power that is not my own. His.
She moves behind the chair, her fingers tracing the line of my spine, pressing at key points where spiritual energy pools. Her touch is clinical, precise, but I feel her recoil slightly, a minute flinch that I might have missed if I weren’t her daughter.
“There are… patterns,” she says, her voice strained. “Under your skin. Lines of energy that don’t belong to you… to our bloodline.” Her hands map them out, a delicate yet horrified exploration of the changes he’s wrought. I’m not sure I want to know them all. Sometimes knowledge only adds weight.
“What did he do to you?” she whispers, with a mixture of both concern and anger.
“Basically, what grandma wanted,” I can’t help but reply, bitterness coloring my tone. “He gave me his blood.”
“Gave you?” she repeats, and now an accusation is there, cold and sharp as a shard of glass. “Or forced it on you? Esme, this is more than a simple transfusion. This is like a binding. An alteration at the deepest level. He has marked you… Claimed you.”
I exhale slowly. “Yeah, he basically already told me that,” I say. “But he might not have given me his blood if I hadn’t asked for it… ifgrandmahadn’t told me to demand it. At Heathborne, she said I needed to drink it to survive his unbinding ritual.”And I’m still not sure if that’s really true—if I could have survived it without drinking from him.
“She might have been right that it was for your protection,” Mom says. “But that doesn’t change… the situation.”
“Which is?” I murmur.
“That it’s permanent.”
Great. Confirmation right from my mother’s mouth.
“And we also don’t know how it could affect the Ide Trials: having foreign blood flowing through you.”
I frown. “Blythe and Corvin seem to think it will be an advantage. Added strength.”
Mom hesitates. “We hope so, but we can’t know for sure. This whole situation is… unprecedented. At least based on my knowledge.”
Her hand slides from my shoulder, down my arm, and takesmine. I expect her to check my pulse again, but she just holds it, her focus on the golden band on my finger. Her thumb traces the intricate pattern, and I feel a faint warmth-pulse from the metal, a subtle response to her touch. She can sense the magic woven into it, the foreign, fiery signature that now clings to me like a second skin.
“What is this?” she breathes.
A detail I’d left out in the council meeting was the fact I actually married Dayn. It didn’t seem… completely relevant at that time.
“It’s a marriage band,” I say, the words feeling foreign and absurd on my tongue. I try to pull my hand back, but her grip is strong.
Her eyes widen. “Marriage?” The word is a choked whisper. “Es, what have you done?”
“What I had to do to survive,” I snap, the defensiveness sharp and automatic. “It was a political move to save my skin. It meant nothing.”
The lie tastes like ash in my mouth. It meant nothing. But my pulse is still hammering from just seeing him in the dungeon, and this ring feels like it’s fused to my very bone.
“Nothing?” She lets go of my hand as if it’s been burned, her face pale with horror. “A dragon’s vow is not ‘nothing.’ It is an ancient, binding magic. This isn’t politics. This is… another claim.” Her voice drops, trembling with a fury I haven’t seen in years. “He has bound you to him, body and soul.”
“Not exactly,” I say sharply. “I still have free will.”
Yet even as I say the words, a cool doubt creeps in. Because this isn’t a political contract. It’s something I don’t understand. Something that has its own hunger, its own appetite. And something that tells me I could refuse it every day for the next century and still feel his heat in my veins when he’s half a continent away.
Because I still don’t know where it leads.
I stand abruptly. “I need to go. We can talk… later.”
The path to the coven’s graveyard is slick with a thin layer of moss that grows between the flagstones. This old, quiet part of the grounds, tucked away behind the main infirmary, where the ancient yew trees cast the world in an almost perpetual twilight.
