Has he felt this… thispullfrom the start?
When I open my mouth to ask, what comes out is a stammered, sort of pathetic, “Wh-where’s Venna?”
He raises a brow. “Outside, in the shadows, on watch. I only had a moment to slip in here during the change of the guards. She’s prepared to distract them or knock them out when I need to leave. Here,” Stark says, passing something through the bars.
I struggle to tear my gaze from his dark eyes. For a second, it feels like it would be easier to pry the iron bars between us open.
For what? I don’t know. To punch him in the jaw. Or?—
“Take it,” he says.
I finally manage to look down. The hair on the back of my neck rises instantly. My headache throbs. Stark’s hand is closed around the delicate bend of the crown’s metal, his fingers curled around the incredibly lifelike pelt of one of the wolves.
I stare at it for a moment, that reaching feeling aching in my bones.
The crown looks delicate despite its obvious age, with fine detailing and intricate spires. Two beautiful golden wolves leap towards each other, their lithe bodies curled around the ring of the crown from tip to tail. Their muzzles meet at the center as if they’re engaged in an eternal dance.
Cradled between their outstretched paws is a huge, ancient opal.
The stone is the twin of the one in the necklace my mother gave me, glinting with the same age-old luster.
I reach for it slowly. When my hand closes around it, the cool metal heats. It pulses, a shivering ripple moving through the air. Just holding it in my hand, my lungs tingle with something electric and my blood pulses with power.
If holding it could do this, what would wearing it feel like?
Slowly, I lift it to my head. As I do, my eyes follow the incessant pull back to Stark. He’s watching me with a restrained expression on his face, like usual.
Except… his lips are slightly parted. And his hand is so tight on the bars that his knuckles are paling.
I shut my eyes as the wolves’ tails slide over my temples and slip into my hair. As soon as the metal settles on my head, a sharp sting of pain strikes like a bolt of lightning through my brain.
And I sink.
I fall right through the dungeon floor, its walls ripped away and replaced by rushing darkness. I’m vividly aware of my body melting away from my mind, left behind as I fall and fall towards an encroaching spin of color.
Suddenly, I’m jolted into place, my consciousness settling like it’s stepped over a familiar threshold.
I’m in the castle, except it’s not the one I know.
Its high ceilings and echoing halls are the same, but the atmosphere is different. Warmer. Vivid. I know instinctively that this is a memory or a vision. There’s a sense that what I’m seeing isn’t immediate, as though time and space have blurred at the edges.
Yet it’s too real to be a mere dream.
When I turn, that subtle warmth crystallizes. I can suddenly make sense of it.
Peace. That’s what it is.
The corridors are unified. The cold stone walls that have since been erected are no longer here. The division between the Bonded and royal sides of the castle are gone.
Massive wolves pad freely through the halls, their claws clicking and their tails swinging. They move alongside humans.Commonhumans, by the look of them. Not Bonded.
People talk and smile. A peal of bright laughter rings like a bell from somewhere out of sight. A direwolf to my right huffs loudly and whips the human he’s walking beside with his tail, and she just grins up at him as they walk past me.
Turning, I look back down the long hall, back towards what I know as the Bonded side of the castle. This feels real. More than real, actually.Right. As though the cold and dark world I know as reality is nothing but a nightmare.
Those walls between us… like someone’s shoved a frigid piece of metal between two halves of one heart.
Something tugs at me. A glimmer of light in the corner of my eye. A whirling of the surrounding hallways. I’m drawn forward on a wind I can’t feel until I’m suddenly elsewhere.
