SEVEN
Flynn
I almost laughed. It was a bark of a sound, sharp and jagged, scraping against the back of my throat like a swallowed bone that refused to go down. The irony was so thick I could practically chew on it, a bitter gristle between my teeth.
Remind the gods why they were afraid of us.
It was a beautiful line. Truly. Just the sort of thing that ended up carved on a tombstone. Kaelen had always possessed a flair for the dramatic, a byproduct of spending a millennium brooding in a cage woven from his own wounded pride and thwarted ambition. If words could kill, if metaphors could sever heads, the Dragon Prince would have conquered Olympus centuries ago and mounted the heads of the Fates on his wall.
But we weren’t in a throne room, surrounded by trembling subjects. We weren't standing at the head of an iron-clad army ready to scorch the earth.
We were five fugitives shivering in a damp hole in the basement of the world, wearing moth-eaten wool that smelled of dead beetles and ancient mold, staring at a structure that looked like a coffin built for a giant. The air down here was heavy,pressing against my eardrums, thick with the scent of stagnant water and the rocky, mineral tang of deep earth.
"He means we have to?—"
I started to clarify, stepping forward to strip away Kaelen's poetic waxing and give Aria the raw, unvarnished truth of whatbindingactually entailed. She didn't need riddles right now; she needed the ugly facts. But before the sentence could leave my lips, Kaelen’s head snapped toward me. His golden eyes, still molten with the aftershocks of his freezing episode, narrowed into reptilian slits.
Silence, Wolf.
The command wasn't spoken aloud; it was a mental shove, a sudden, violent blast of furnace heat slamming against my psychic shields. It tasted of sulfur and dominance. Beside him, Elias didn't even look up from the black water, but I felt the Phoenix’s disapproval indistinguishable from a static charge raising the fine hair on my arms.
She is barely holding her atoms together, Flynn. Do not break her mind with fear before we have even begun to heal her body.
I snapped my jaw shut, the words dying on my tongue, grinding my teeth together.
Fine. Let them be coy. Let them dance around the fire and pretend we were discussing a pleasant afternoon ritual. But I knew the smell of the magic Kaelen was suggesting. I knew exactly what was required to turn a mortal woman, even one containing the blood of Pandora, into something capable of withstanding the crushing pressure of containing us.
It wasn’t just holding hands and singing songs together in a circle.
It was blood and sweat. It was the complete and total obliteration of the boundaries between five souls. It was sex, yes. The raw, desperate, life-affirming friction that rewired thenervous system. That being said, it was more than just the physical act. It was the kind of intimacy that flayed you open from throat to navel and left you exposed to the freezing air. It was taking the golden threads she’d woven into the Gate and pulling them tight until there was noherand nous, only a singular, terrifyingnow.
And looking at her, standing there in her tattered, blood-stained leathers, swaying like a sapling in a gale... I wasn't sure she would survive the pleasure of it any more than she’d survived the pain of the Sentinel’s spear.
She smelled like a thunderstorm that had burned itself out, leaving only devastation in its wake. There was the sharp tang of ozone, the dusty scent of charred stone, and beneath it all, the sweet, metallic aroma of profound exhaustion. It was the scent of a predator that had run until its heart was ready to burst. Her heart was beating a frantic, fluttery rhythm that I could hear from ten paces away.
Thump-flutter-thump.
Like a trapped bird throwing itself against the iron bars of a cage, desperate for a sky it couldn't reach.
"So," I said, stepping fully into the circle, my voice echoing off the damp obsidian walls. The sound was harsh in the quiet, a deliberate intrusion. I kept my tone light, a mocking counterweight to Kaelen’s suffocating gravity. "Invade heaven. Kick down the doors. Remind Dad we’re still alive. Excellent plan. Ten out of ten, truly inspired. But I have a small, logistical question."
Aria turned her amethyst eyes toward me. They were wide, the pupils blown so large the iris was barely a ring of color, swirling with that unnerving nebula of violet light. She looked at me, but I wasn't sure she wasseeingme. She was looking through my skin, seeing the energy currents, the ley lines, the ghosts of the magic she’d just ingested and expelled.
"Logistical?" she asked, her voice rasping, dry as old paper.
"We are currently sitting under a mountain," I said, gesturing expansively to the shadowy expanse of the cavern. "There’s no food, no water that doesn't look like liquid void heavily laced with poison, and we’re wearing rags that belonged to corpses three centuries ago. And you..."
I moved closer, invading her space because I couldn't help it, because the pull of the bond was a physical hook in my navel dragging me toward her, reeling me in. "...you are running on fumes, Little Pup."
She stiffened as I approached, her spine locking up, but she didn't back away. That was good. The prey drive in me twitched, satisfied that she wasn't running. If she ran, I would have to chase, and neither of us had the energy for that game right now.
"I have the princes' power," she argued, though the defiance was weak. She leaned heavily on her back foot, her body betraying her brave words.
"You have the residue," I corrected, stopping just inches from her. I inhaled deeply, letting her scent fill my lungs, grounding the wolf that was pacing erratic circles in my chest. Under the magic and the blood, she smelled of rain. "You’re an empty cup, Aria. You channeled magic you have no right to hold and you’ve cracked, whether you realize it or not."
Kaelen bristled, stepping forward protectively, his hand twitching toward the hilt of his weapon, but Thane put a massive hand on the Dragon’s shoulder, holding him back. Thane understood. The Bear knew that sometimes, you needed the hard truth to find your footing in the mud. Comfort was useless if it was built on a lie.
"He is right," Elias said, his voice drifting through the damp air like wood smoke. He turned away from the pool, his turquoise eyes uncomfortably lucid, stripping away the gloom. "The obsidian tomb... it is an amplifier, yes. It is a focusing lensfor the arcane. If you step into it now, fully merged with the Gate functionality but lacking the caloric and spiritual energy to sustain it, the amplifier will not open a door to Olympus."
