I sawhim the moment the door slid fully open. Dravok lay on the containment bed, utterly still, strangely vulnerable to the restraint fields humming faintly around him. He didn't stir. Didn't breathe in any way I could see. For one horrifying second, my mind refused to accept that he was alive at all.
My heart lurched painfully.
"Oh—" The sound caught in my throat as instinct took over. I stepped forward, reaching for him without thinking. I needed to touch him. Needed to feelsomething—warmth, breath, proof.
"Nadine." Xandros's hand closed around my arm, firm and unyielding. "Don't touch him."
I turned on him, ready to fight, ready to ignore every warning—I stopped myself. Not because I agreed. Because I knew they would haul me back if I tried. Physically. Without hesitation.And because even through the panic, a deeper fear rooted me in place.
Dravok looked… wrong.
His aura—once so proud, so unmistakably his—was still black, but diminished. Thinned. Like a great fire starved of oxygen, burning inward instead of outward. The edges flickered unevenly, stripped of the gold I remembered, stripped of the vitality that had once filled a room before he ever spoke. It hurt to look at him.
"Oh, Dravok," I whispered, the words barely sounding. "What have they done to you?"
The answer came immediately. Not from Xandros. Not from the room. From the bond.
It surged suddenly, violently, and the world tilted as everything I'd been holding back slammed into me all at once: his rage, his confusion, the brutal force of something inside him pushing and pulling with relentless intent.
He was unconscious. But he wasn't gone. Whatever had its claws in him was very, very awake.
I staggered, my breath left me in sharp gasps as the bond flared brighter, tighter, no longer thinning butstraining, like it was trying to reconnect across a widening gulf.
He was fighting.
Hard.
I knew with terrifying certainty that if I didn't help him now, there would be nothing left to save. But hewasfighting. Not vaguely. Not passively. He was fighting like his existence depended on it.
I staggered forward, barely aware of the room anymore, of the guards, of the weapons trained on him. All of that fell away as the bond pulled tight, no longer thinning butstretching, tentative and fragile andgrowing.
"Oh," I whispered. "Dravok…"
I could feel him, confused, furious, drowning in voices that weren't his. I could feel the strain in him, the way every part of him was being pulled in opposite directions, torn between instinct and something deeper he couldn't remember but refused to surrender.
He was losing ground. I knew it with terrifying certainty.
I didn't think.
I justreached.
I sent my mind outward along the bond, pouring everything I had into it: focus, will, desperation, love I hadn't known how to name until it hurt like this. The effort slammed into me instantly, a wave of pressure that buckled my knees. I sank to the floor with a sharp gasp, palms pressed to the cold metal, sweat broke out across my skin as if I'd been dropped into fire.
"Take it," I whispered through clenched teeth. "All of it. I don't care. Just—take it."
The bond flared brighter, hotter, no longer a thread but a conduit. Suddenly, Isawit. The darkness inside him wasn't abstract. It wasn't a shadow or a void. It washim. A mirror image, sharp-edged and perfect, made of rage and certainty and everything he'd been taught to be without balance. Same strength. Same presence. Same face.
Horror froze me in place.
"Oh god," I breathed. "No…"
The darkness turned toward me and smiled. Not cruelly. Knowingly.
You see now,it said without words.I am not the invader. I am the truth.
Just for a heartbeat, my resolve faltered. The darkness laughed. The sound reverberated through my skull, cold and vast and triumphant. It pushed back against me, hard enough that my vision swam and my hands slipped on the floor. I couldn't fightthat.
I couldn't erasehim. He was Dravok.
