“Gods,” I groaned. “Who knew squatting for an hour would be this excruciating?”
That’s when my curse yawned awake again, sensing, winding tight, inhaling what I could not yet.
Callum’s smirk widened, the kind that meant he’d already written out my suffering in neat little columns.
“I knew.” He rubbed his chin like he was weighing which torture to propose. “That’s why I pushed you the last few weeks. Starting the day after tomorrow,” he paused, savoring it, “three hundred squats. Easy start.”
I barked a laugh. I could carve a path through men all day, but one of Callum’s training sessions left me considering death as a kindness.
“Yeah, that’s not happening—”
My words leaked into the air, cut short by the stagnant abyss before us. Misty shadows tangled thick, too heavy, too still.
The Viper hissed against my ribs, pressing sharp until my skin prickled.
It had gone quiet. Not the peaceful, calming silence where your mind is its own, but the deadly hush of a predator.
A stillness that sees you.
Callum’s hand went straight to his sword, the blade singing against the air.
“It’s not Rook or Ford. They’re still about a hundred yards out.” He angled the point into the ink, into that shape that wasn’t shape at all.
We hadn’t missed one. Couldn’t have. They’d been outnumbered. If anything had slipped past the fight, someone would’ve seen. Someone would’ve stopped them.
Yet something moved there, hidden in the shadows, woven into them heavier than the rest.
“V—” He took a step forward. “Do you have eyes on anything?”
“It’s watching,” I breathed. “I can feel it.”
Because I could. It felt like ice and doom scouring across the rocky ground, seeping into the soil. It didn’t unnerve like the stillness of dark things. This was patient.
Callum spoke it with verdict; words I had never heard him speak before. “Let it out, Verena. Now.”
My head whipped toward him.
Eight years with this curse. Eight years of holding the leash tight, and neveroncehad Callum demanded it of me. What did he sense? What could he possibly see that I could not?
I could feel the other watching from the space between my eyes, eager. My stomach clenched at a rising thought.
What if I wasn’t enough without it? What if who I was beneath the venom wasn’t a match for whatever hunted us in that dark?
Callum’s jaw was iron, flame dancing in his palm.
He didn’t waver. He wouldn’t. He was always honest, brutally so, and still somehow the kind of leader who made you believe you could be more than your scars. He would never ask if there wasn’t reason—
“Verena.” His voice broke on my name. The dread beneath it bared itself at last. “Summon it.”
The command was quiet, and it shook me more than any roar ever could.
I didn’t falter as my vision narrowed, coal slits replacing what once were rounded pupils. The blue-green of my irises drowned into a deep, venom-dark teal.
I focused on the place where the wrongness bled through the trees, where the air itself dripped with falsehood. A tickle sliced down my palm as my serpent stirred, scaled coils unspooling from my wrist, streaking silent across the soil below.
Once, it had only been a bracelet Callum pressed into my hand years ago when the curse had only just awakened, black stone carved into a snake swallowing its own tail.
It had locked into place the second it touched my skin. And it had not released me since.
