He knew. He had known before I even arrived.
“Forgive me,” Cassian whispered.
The iron root had already sunk too deep. Hands seized me from behind. My body betrayed me, weight dragging me down to one knee. The edges of the room began to swim.
I tried to move. Tried to kill them all. My body wouldn’t obey.
Cassian knelt beside me. His hand pressed to my chest like he could comfort me through betrayal.
“My apologies, brother,” he said again.
My limbs were heavy and foreign, as if they had been carved from stone. Hands seized me from behind—too many to count—and the world tilted as they dragged me across the marble floor. The great doors groaned open.
They pulled me down a narrow corridor, the air turning colder, thicker. Torches guttered against the draft as they hauledme into one of the inner chambers reserved for rituals that never saw sunlight.
The room reeked of iron and ash. Chains hung from the ceiling. Once, they had been decorative, now they would serve a purpose. The stone table at the center glistened wet in the firelight.
They dropped me onto it like an offering. The cold bit through my clothes. I tried to lift my head, to tear out someone’s throat, but my body was no longer mine.
Cassian appeared in my line of sight, face pale, jaw locked. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. Behind him, the witch entered—hood drawn, eyes black as oil. She began to chant, low and rhythmic, the language older than either of us.
Cassian finally moved closer, pressing a trembling hand to my chest. “It was this, or watch them siphon every bit of who you are.”
I didn’t give him the gratification of acknowledgment.
The witch’s voice rose. Power filled the room, heavy as stone. The narrow injector hovered over my heart. It glowed violet, veins of light pulsing from the core. I could smell the iron root, the poison that would put me in stasis.
Then the injector slid between my ribs.
The compound spread fast, locking my muscles one by one. The world dulled at the edges, sounds flattening into a low, distant hum. I tried to draw in a breath, but my lungs refused to respond.
My body locked. My lungs refused air. My heart went still.
Ambrosia leaned down, her breath brushing my cheek. “Sleep well,” she whispered.
Then silence descended on me.
I fell into darkness that lasted over three hundred years.
Chapter 16
Cristian
The memory clung to me like the taste of iron. The hall. Cassian’s voice. The burn of his betrayal. The sound of my own fury echoing off stone.
I forced a breath, grounding myself in the present—the soft tick of a clock, the warmth that hung in the air from her.
Nadia.
Her scent steadied me. It rooted me in this century. In her world.
But the past didn’t loosen its hold on me easily. It stayed beneath my skin, whispering through old scars. I had been betrayed before. I would not be caught unprepared again. Lena’s disappearance had the Sovereign Court written all over it.
Nadia was pacing the length of the bedroom, hair loose, eyes wild. Her heartbeat stumbled in its rhythm, quick and uneven. Every thud of it was a pull on the tether that bound us.
She’d tied her life to mine. If I fell, so would she. I could feel her pulse like a second heart beating beneath mine. Her hands were shaking. Her panic was rising, bleeding into me through the bond. She was unraveling.
We would find Lena, and I would keep all of us safe. I would figure out the bond and release Nadia from any ties to the Sovereign Court.
