They don't realize Drazex has walked these tunnels since he was nineteen years old. He knows every turn, every junction, every shadow where the light fails to reach. These passages aren't a maze to him. They're a map written into muscle memory, paths he could trace blindfolded.
I stumble on the rough stone, and the guards yank me upright hard enough to wrench my shoulders. The tunnels narrow and the emergency lighting grows sparse. The sounds of the compound fade to nothing but our footsteps echoing off rock.
We come to a dark tunnel where the end is made into a cage. Metal bars glint in the dim light. The space behind the bars is small, not tall enough for standing, not wide enough for lying down without curling tight.
One guard opens the door and the other shoves me inside. I fall to my hands and knees, rock scraping my skin before the door slams shut behind me, and the lock engages with a sound that reverberates through my bones.
Vezra studies me through the bars. “You'll remain here until Lord Vorath determines you're no longer useful as leverage.” She turns to the guards. “Return to your posts. I'll handle the rest.”
The guards disappear into the tunnel, and their footsteps fade. Vezra watches them go, then turns back to me with an expression that holds no pity.
“He can't save you. Drazex lacks the power to challenge his father. Lord Vorath commands this house, commands the enforcers who serve it, commands everything that moves within these walls. If you're wise, you'll accept this. Sentiment brought you here. Sentiment won't get you out.”
She leaves and time passes in silence. I can't track it without the compound's artificial lighting cycles, without the rhythm of meals or shift changes or any markers that organize existence into comprehensible segments. There's only the rock beneath me, the stone walls rising around the alcove, the quiet that presses against my ears.
I don't break down. The temptation surfaces in waves that threaten to drag me under. The shadows are complete in a way I've never experienced, a totality that erases the boundary between open eyes and closed. A chill works deeper with each passing hour, and the bruises on my face throb in counterpoint to the claiming marks that still pulse with their own heat.
I curl against the cage bars, wrap my arms around my knees, and breathe. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Drazex will come. He will find me and he will come for me. He'll come not because I'm property, but because I'm his chosen and he's mine. No cage can contain what we've built.
Soft sounds reach me. Claws scrabbling on stone, bodies rustling through shadow. A crevik emerges from the gloom first, a ghost taking shape from darkness. The creatures that Drazex feeds down here have found me too.
I hold my breath and my body still, letting it approach without startling, without triggering the flight response. It reaches the bars and presses its nose through the gap. Sniffs at my hand where it rests against the floor.
Then it makes a sound, a soft chittering that echoes in the alcove’s silence. Call and summons both, a declaration that safety is found. They emerge from crevices in the stone. Six of them. Ten. More than I can count, their bodies pressing toward the cage, toward me, toward the scent that clings to my skin and hair and every inch of flesh Drazex claimed.
They don't recognize me. They recognize him. His scent layered into my cells, into my blood, into the breath I exhale. I smell of the male who cares for them, and that scent means safety.
They can't enter the cage, but they surround it. Their bodies press against the bars, offering warmth through metal, making their chittering sounds in chorus. One pushes its nose through a gap and rubs against my hand, and the contact cracks open a hollow I didn't realize I'd been protecting.
Tears spill without permission. Not despair or fear but an emotion I can't name. One that has no place in this cage but fills it anyway. These creatures have no value in the economy of Vahiri Prime. They serve no purpose. They exist in the margins, surviving because they learned to be invisible to predators who would destroy them. Drazex protected them and now they're protecting me.
Their fur is coarse but warm, their bodies radiating heat that works through the metal and into my frozen skin. Their bodies radiate heat that drives back the numbness, and I drift in and out of an awareness that isn't quite sleep.
My mind cycles through memories and plans and fragments of sensation that surface. His mouth when he kissed me. Arms when he held me through my nightmares. Humming that rumbled through my chest, his mother’s song rising from a place he thought he’d sealed forever.
He claimed me. Marked me in ways that go deeper than the bruises on my skin.
And I claimed him back.
The mutual claiming is what Vorath can't understand. His philosophy depends on the assumption that caring flows in one direction, that the one who loves is vulnerable to the one who is loved, that sentiment creates weakness in its wake.
He doesn't comprehend that it can be reciprocal. That I'm not a weapon being used against his son. That I'm a partner who walked into the shadows with open eyes and stayed.
When Drazex comes, he won't find a female who needs saving. He'll find a partner ready to tear his father's empire apart.
I settle against the bars with the creviks gathered near, their warmth proof of his hidden heart, their presence proof of everything he protected in secret. Vorath wanted to use cruelty as a cage. Instead, he surrounded me with evidence of everything his son has fought to preserve.
Gentleness. Compassion. The capacity to care for beings that offer nothing in return except their existence.
Chapter Fifteen
DRAZEX
Blood coats my knuckles in a film that has long since stopped mattering. Another corridor cleared. Another male who could not tell me where they took her, or would not, and the distinction ceased to hold meaning three hours ago. My father's compound has become a maze of locked doors and averted gazes and staff who press themselves into shadows when they hear my approach. Let them cower. Let them understand what happens when someone touches what belongs to me.
Love makes you weak.
My father’s words echo through the chambers of my skull, and I bare my fangs at the empty corridor. Weak. He wanted me to believe caring was weakness, forged me into a weapon and spent thirty years ensuring that weapon never turned against the hand that wielded it. He should have considered what happens when the weapon finds a reason to turn.
