Aveline
He reached his hand down to me.
I looked at it.
His hand, which had touched my face a thousand times. Which had pressed against my waist while he siphoned what was mine and called it comfort. Which had been extended to me my entire life in gestures that looked like love and functioned like control.
I took it.
His grip closed over mine and the connection opened the way it always did when he touched me. The channel he’d spent years maintaining, the pathway worn smooth by continuous use, as familiar to my body as breathing. He’d built it into me so gradually and so early that I had never felt it form. I had only ever experienced its effects.
But I knew the pathway now. And I understood, standing in the ruins of my mother’s tower with stone dust in the air and my mates against the wall behind me, that a channel runs in both directions.
I pulled.
Not the way he pulled—not the patient, managed extraction of someone tending a resource. I pulled the way the tower had shaken. The way the lightning had come down outside. The way years of slow drainage and suppressed power felt when it finally found a direction.
His hand spasmed in mine as he tried to pull free. I held on with what remaining strength I had.
His eyes met mine, and for the first time in my life, I saw something in them I had never seen.
Fear.
“What are you doing?”
“You showed me how,” I said.
The magic coming back through the connection was enormous. Not refined, not structured, nothing like the controlled working he’d been applying to me for years. It was raw, accumulated, and all the things the array had been stripping for decades. It moved through the channel with the immense force of something that had been dammed and had finally broken free.
He staggered, falling to his knees.
His free hand went to his chest, and the floor of his power was surfacing faster than he’d expected, because he’d spent so much power attacking the tower and entering it. Now I was taking back what was mine, and what he had. Some of the magic was mine, some was his, and some had the flavor of other magic. He had been siphoning other mages also, to keep himself powerful. That ended now.
He pulled at the connection, desperately trying to close it. But I remained firm, growing stronger while he grew weaker. And my mates were feeding on our bond, also gaining strength.
“Let go,” he said, and his voice had lost its gentleness. Now there was fear, desperation. Terror. “Aveline. Let go.”
I didn’t let go.
He lunged for the door, but the tower ward hit him like a wall.
Malric activated it through the bond. As his strength returned, he connected with the tower and reinforced it. The entry sealed. Not the way the thorns had sealed, not the way the portal had been blocked. This was structural, deep, the tower’s own stone repurposed into a cage with the king already inside it.
My father turned back from the door with his face stripped of everything it usually wore.
He looked at me without the gentleness, without the patience, without the false warmth he had aimed at me my entire life, like a tool. He looked at me the way I imagined he looked at the things he was actually afraid of.
“You can’t hold me,” he said.
Malric, standing tall behind me, said nothing. His hand was against the stone and his eyes were closed, and I felt through the bond what he was doing. He was manipulating the tower’s architecture, finding every binding, every anchor, looking for the structural elements that could be turned toward one purpose. He found what he was looking for, and another ward activated, deeper than the first, connected to the foundation stones.
The floor hummed.
My father’s expression changed again, something ugly.
“Clever. A ward-reader. I should have had you killed six years ago when you were in my possession,” he snarled. “You can’t hold me indefinitely. Whatever power she’s drawing back through that connection, it won’t be enough to sustain that anchor ward. You’re running on borrowed time, and you know it.”
He was right.
