Page 33 of Orc’s Grimoire

Researching. Looking for a solution. Doing her job while you stand here and try to pretend you haven’t been claimed.

I should go to her. The mark demands it—that craving growing stronger with every minute I resist, every moment I spend pretending I’m still in control of my own choices. The longer I wait, the worse it will get. That’s how mating marks work. They reward proximity, punish distance.

And they never, ever let go.

I turn toward the manor entrance. The iron-wrought doors stand open, darkness pooling beyond them. Somewhere in that darkness, the grimoire waits. The Author stirs. And a woman who has been bleeding for this place for six years is still looking for a way to save it.

Or damn us both.

I walk into the dark.

The Archive tonight is not hostile but watching—every shadow aware, the grimoire’s attention tracking me from the Restricted Stacks before I’ve crossed the entrance hall.

It knows where I am. Knows where I’m going. Probably knows what I’m thinking.

The thought should terrify me. Instead, I just feel tired. I’ve spent twenty years fighting magic, burning it, reducing it to harmless ash. Now magic has gotten inside me—claimed me in ways my brand can’t burn away—and all I can do is keep walking.

I focus on the pull in my chest instead. Let the mating mark guide me.

This is how it starts. You follow the mark. You stop thinking for yourself. You become what the magic wants you to become.

But I don’t turn back. I keep walking. And with every step, the need intensifies.

I find her in the Scriptorium.

She’s alone—the scribes fled or dismissed, their abandoned workstations covered in scrolls and open texts. Every surface is cluttered with research: charts showing containment patterns, histories of previous keepers, diagrams of magical bindings that make my head ache to look at.

Thyra sits at the center of the chaos. Her dark hair has come loose from its braids, falling around her face in ink-stained tangles. Her bandaged hands leave smears of blood on everything she touches—she’s reopened her wounds, probably without noticing, too focused on her work to care about pain.

She’s striking.

She’s the keeper of a monster. She’s killed people to feed that monster. She’s bound to you by magic you didn’t choose and can’t control.

None of that changes what I see.

I step into the Scriptorium. The motion draws her attention—she looks up, those dark eyes finding mine across the cluttered room. The sigils on her collarbone glow faintly through the collar of her robe, pulsing in time with the marks on my own chest.

“Spell-burner.” Her voice is rough. Exhausted. “I wondered when you’d come.”

“The mating mark.” I cross toward her, weaving between tables, stepping over scattered scrolls. “Do you feel it?”

She doesn’t answer immediately. Her gaze drops to my chest, to the marks visible through my torn shirt. I see her studying them—the mating mark’s sigils, the grimoire’s claiming script, the way they pulse in unison like twin hearts sharing the same blood.

“I feel…” She pauses, choosing words carefully. “Heat. Awareness. Like knowing where you are without seeing you.”

“That’s the beginning.” I stop at the edge of her table, close enough to touch. The tension between us is almost unbearable now—a physical force, demanding contact. “It gets worse. The longer we resist, the more it demands.”

“And if we don’t resist?”

The question hangs in the air. I can smell her from here—the burnt warmth of sigil-heat carried on her skin, and beneath that something unmistakably, infuriatingly alive. It makes my pulse quicken despite every rational thought in my head.

“Then we’re bound.” My voice comes out rougher than intended. “Permanently. Your life tied to mine. Your death tied to mine.”

She laughs.

Not amusement—bitterness, sharp and brittle. The sound echoes off the Scriptorium’s high ceilings, carrying notes of exhaustion and defeat.

“I’m already bound to a sentient book.” She gestures at the research surrounding her, at the blood-smeared scrolls and scattered texts. “What’s one more chain?”