He tapped a finger against the glass, tracing a line above the skyline. “Now, regarding the Lows. My monitors registered a distinct anomaly less than twenty-four hours ago. A short thermal spike near the fight pits.”
He turned to face me then, his violet eyes ruthless and sharp. “Did you feel it?”
I maintained a mask of perfect indifference. “I felt nothing.”
“Curious.” He stepped closer, his aura pressing against the air like a physical barrier. “My sensors tracked the resonance for three seconds before dampeners killed it. That is an ignition, Riven. A beacon. And you, my primary eyes in the district, missed it entirely.”
“My focus was on the police,” I said calmly. “As ordered.”
Korenth watched me. He knew a lie when he heard one, but he simply didn’t know which lie I was telling.
He turned back to his desk. I noticed a datapad sitting there, glowing with a stream of encrypted intel. The formatting was foreign; the encryption style distinct from my own reports.
The realisation hit me hard. He had other eyes in the Lows.
He was withholding information. The augmentation project—the dead guard, the stolen magic—was the main vein, and he was neck-deep in an expansion he didn’t trust me to see.
The thought sent a spike through my chest—sharper than jealousy. It was the instinct of a weapon realising it was about to be replaced.
Korenth looked up from the datapad, his focus narrowing to a razor edge. “If you feel anything—anything at all—you report it to me. Do not make the mistake of thinking you can handle a variable like this alone.”
I gave a single, rigid nod. And I lied again.
“Understood.”
Leaving his tower, the stillness of the corridor felt like a reprieve.
My mind sharpened, forcing the unwanted image of Selene’s golden eyes into the background.
Korenth had felt the surge. His other agents—whoever they were—were hunting with a desperation that trickled down from the very top. If Selene walked into Highspire leaking power like she did in the alley, they would dissect her.
She was an anomaly. For twenty years, I had existed in a vacuum, immune to connection, yet her presence had somehow breached that silence. I needed to understand the mechanics of that pull before Korenth destroyed the source. Helping her contain that surge was a reflex—a desperate bid to keep her off the monitors. But a temporary fix wasn’t enough.
I stepped into the lift, my spine rigid. She needed an anchor. She had to learn to bury that power so deep that even Korenth couldn’t track it.
This was about containment.
Practical. Necessary. Strictly professional.
FOURTEEN
Selene
The warmth settled deep in my bones, a dense, comfortable anchor. My eyelids peeled open, reluctant to trade the dark for the grey morning light. The ceiling was familiar, but the air in the flat had changed. It smelled of rain-soaked stone and ozone—electricity trapped in a bottle.
Riven.
Every instinct sharpened at the thought, a silent acknowledgement of territory. My body, traitor that it was, softened. It remembered safety. I hated that it remembered safety.
I pushed myself up, a groan catching halfway in my throat. My left side protested, but it was a different kind of pain. The scorching, alien burn had faded into a dull ache, like a bruise settling after a bone mends itself.
My magic, usually a frantic flutter or a dull annoyance, stirred beneath my skin. It was responsive. Calmer. The sheer normalcy of it unnerved me.
Flashes hit me, not of pictures, but of sensations. First, the headache—a blinding, white-hot spike of pressure behind my eyesthat threatened to split my skull. Then Riven’s hand, hard and cool, pressing against my chest. My own hand flat against his heart, feeling the fast beat against my palm. The jolt, a current of heat passing from him to me.
Feel it, Selene.
I clenched my eyes shut, shoving the images back into the dark corner of my mind. My magic murmured in response, a soft, treacherous purr beneath my ribs. I hated that too.
