Eventually, I lay down on the bench in the corner and closed my eyes. Just for a moment, I told myself. Just long enough to gather the courage to go to her tomorrow.
The bond hummed low and steady under my ribs. It wasn’t tugging or even demanding. It was just…there.
I fell asleep to the thought of her laugh echoing off my workshop walls.
I didn’t know how long I’d been out when the world tilted. It didn’t start with sound. It started withabsence.
One second, the bond was a quiet, warm presence—like a candle flickering in another room. Not bright, but steady. Familiar and comforting, even when I pretended it wasn’t.And in the next second, itlurched.The candle didn’t just flicker. Ityanked.
My entire body jerked as if someone had sunk a hook into my sternum and pulled. I woke with a strangled gasp.
My heart was a drum in my chest. My blood flared hot and sharp beneath my skin. For a half-breath, I didn’t even remember where I was.
Then Ribbon exploded into action.The toad slammed into the side of my body with enough force to nearly flip it. He croaked—loud, frantic and wild. Not his usual dramatic noise. This was sharper, more panicked.
“Ribbon—what—?”
He hit me again, full-body, like he was trying to get me going. My feet hit the floor and the moment I stood, another pulse tore through the bond. Not warm this time.
Wrong.
Every instinct I had—the trained ones, the battle-honed ones, and even the feral ones I’d spent my entire life suppressing—roared awake all at once. My vision blurred at the edges, tunneling and my breathing came too fast.
“Hanna,” I rasped.
Nothing answered. The bond—that steady, constant hum of her—was no longer where it should be.It wasn’t gone. It was quiet and… muffled. Almost as if it was being smothered.Like someone had dropped a thick veil over it and was dragging it away from me. My blood ran cold in my veins.
Ribbon barreled toward the stairs, croaking with sharp, staccato urgency. He looked back at me, eyes wide, and slammed his head against the door. He wanted me tomove.
I did. I didn’t decide to, but my body was already moving before thought caught up.I took the stairs in a jump, fingers clenching hard, already ready to pry open doors. The moment my boots hit the hallway floor, I felt it.
A shimmer in the air. A faint, oily residue of magick that made my skin crawl.
Glamor.
It was a type of magick that the warlocks on Hellplane had used often. I’d recognize it anywhere. Powerful, precise magick that was designed to slip around perception like smoke.My lips pulled back in a snarl I didn’t recognize as mine.
“Corwin,” I growled, without proof, without logic—just raw certainty boiling in my gut.
The bond pulsed again. But it was fainter and further away.
No. No.No.
Something old and buried inside of me snapped its chains. My grandmother used to whisper about it in stories. An orc’s last line of defense. The ancient instinct that rose when a bonded mate was threatened beyond reason.
Mating rage, they called it. I’d spent my entire life makingsure I never woke it up, but it was already too late.It stormed through me like a wildfire, igniting every vein, every cell, every piece of me that had ever tried to stay controlled and calm and safe.
Not safe anymore.
Ribbon raced ahead, his webbed feet slapping the floor, following a path the wards couldn’t show me—because the wards had been bent. Twisted and glamored.
Hanna’s presence—herself—was slipping further and further away, like someone dragging her down a tunnel and slamming doors shut between us. My vision sharpened with the activation of my primal instincts.
Every smell, every sound, every vibration in the air came into brutally clear focus. There wasfear,residual magic and the faint stink of city exhaust from outside, where there shouldn’t be any this time of night.And under it, woven like a thread of poison—Corwin’s cologne. Citrus and arrogance.
My hands clenched into fists so tight my claws—half-flared and uncontrolled—bit into my palms. I followed Ribbon through the building, the glamor trying to slide over my senses, make me doubt the opening doors, the empty hallways and the lack of witnesses.
No one had seen anything, butof course they hadn’t. The spell didn’t just hide the abductors—it smudged intention, blurred memory and made your mind slip sideways when you tried tonotice.If not for the bond—if not for Ribbon—I might’ve slept through it all. I hit the coven floor with all the subtlety of a war hammer.
