“Maybe not. But I found two.”
His eyes dropped.
To my neck. The left side first, Malric’s mark, still tender at the edges. Then the right, Thane’s. He looked at both of them with a narrowed gaze.
The silence stretched.
When he looked up, his face had changed.
“You bonded them,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Both.”
“Yes.”
The composure cracked along one fault line. Just one, quickly controlled, but I saw it. A flash of something behind his eyes that was not calculation and not strategy and was not the measured response of a man who managed things.
It was fury.
“I can break that bond,” he said.
The words were quiet. That was what made them land the way they did—not shouted, not heated, spoken with the flat certainty of someone stating a fact they’d already verified.
“A mating bond can be broken,” he continued, “with sufficient power and the right application. It is not reversible by the bonded parties, but it can be severed from outside.” He looked at me steadily. “It will kill them. The severance backlash at their strength of bond will be fatal.” A pause. “I am stronger than they are. I have been running on your power for years and I have resources they cannot match.”
I said nothing.
“I own you. That is not cruelty. That is the reality of what I built and what you are and what the kingdom requires. You were always going to come back to this tower with me. The only variable was the condition in which you arrived.”
His words triggered something deep inside of me—a cold rage, nothing like the heat that had flared in the dining room and set the runes glowing. This was quieter than that. More final.
“You no longer have power over me. The circle is broken. The array is gone. Your portal is blocked.” I held his gaze. “Everything you built here to contain me is finished.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he smiled.
It was the smile I knew best, the one he used when he was about to explain something he found gently amusing. The smile that meant he was not concerned. The smile he had used my entire life to signal that whatever I thought I understood, I had missed something important.
“My darling girl,” he said. “I don’t need the circle when I am standing right here.”
He began to speak.
Not words I recognized. A language older than anything in the tower’s library, syllables that resonated in the air, and his hands came up, before I’d registered what was happening—the pull. The recognizable pull, the one he’d used my entire life in the dining room and attributed to his touch and his visits and never once to the floor beneath my feet.
He was doing it directly.
Without the array, without any infrastructure, just him and whatever years of collected power had built inside him.
My knees hit the floor.
It was not a decision. My legs simply collapsed, and I was down, one hand catching the stone, the other pressed to my chest where the bond was.
The bond.
I seized it with everything I had left.
