He broke off. Color drained from his face. Slowly, horror dragged his gaze toward Fenn.
“Don’t panic, princeling. I’m not rooting around in your thoughts…yet.”
Serenna flinched. “Did you say that to me?”
Fenn blinked. “No. That was for—”
“I heard him too,” Vesryn gritted out, fingers clenching on his knees.
Fenn sat up straighter.“You both can hear me?”
“Stop yelling in my head!”
“I wasn’t—”
“Enough!” Serenna’s shriek tore free as she clutched her skull. “Both of you—just shut up. One second.Please.”
Silence crashed in, but the twined cord—or whatever it was—vibrated with Vesryn’s dread and Fenn’s amusement.
“Stars,” Serenna whispered. “This isn’t a bond.”
“No,” Vesryn said, his words gone hollow. “It’s a fucking curse.”
CHAPTER 39
JASSYN
Jassyn paced long after midnight, his restless steps carved into the reed-woven rug. Starlight glimmered silver across Asharyn’s skyline as the city slumbered—unscarred and impossibly serene, as if the havoc in the Maw had already faded into memory.
A warm breeze drifted through the open windows of his chambers, too gentle for a world still teetering on the verge of destruction.
Three days had blurred past since he’d collapsed on the Blackreach’s shore. He’d woken in his bed with Aiko curled beside him, the vulpintera the only evidence that Lykor had even been there at all.
Jassyn hadn’t seen him once. Not in the palace corridors. Not in the suffocating council chambers. Not even flashing through Aesar’s eyes when tempers flared between the factions during debates about what to do with the king’s surrendered forces.
Three days of absence and not a single word.
He hadn’t gone to Lykor either. Pride had nothing to do with it. His lungs cinched at the thought of meeting a gaze that might’ve finally turned cold.
Jassyn kept telling himself he’d made the right calls—sending Lykor to guard Asharyn, choosing mercy over vengeance, coercing minds to stop the slaughter when the battlefield descended into chaos.
But maybe a clean betrayal toward Lykor would’ve made this more bearable.
At least then he’d know which part of himself to hate.
Jassyn halted in the center of his chambers, fingers dragging through his curls. The silence pressed hard enough to bruise, broken only by Aiko’s soft purring from his bed, where she’d slept every night since the battle.
His gaze caught on the wall dividing his chambers from Lykor’s—rooms left dark and untouched for days. He knew Aesar stayed with Kal farther down the hall. Just like he knew he should let the impulse wither before it rooted and respect Lykor’s arrangement with Aesar.
But the ache in his ribs only jabbed sharper. Three days of pretending the distance didn’t gut him had stripped him past any pretense of calm.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Jassyn exhaled hard. The last thing he wanted was to intrude, to risk fracturing anything else. Yet the silence had turned predatory, leeching him dry one slow hour at a time.
Lykor had once mentioned, offhand and irritated, how Kal would brush against Aesar’s mind without even grazing his own. A telepathic channel threaded so precisely it bypassed Lykor entirely.
Jassyn had never tried to reach him that way. He didn’t fully understand why the thought rose now—madness, desperation, or both—but the hollowness gnawing at him had grown unbearable.
Hecoulddo it. If he was careful. Though he doubted Lykor would welcome anyone breaching his mind, no matter how gently they knocked.
