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Maisie opened her Alicorn Sight wider. Her eyes searched my arm, then the air around it, then the empty place where the line had been. She looked again because wanting something too badly made proof feel fragile.

“Nothing attached,” she said.

Carrick crackled into a shape that was mostly static and one truly disapproving eyebrow. “Confirmed.”

Sully said nothing.

Fear opened inside me for half a heartbeat.

“Lad.”

“Aye?”

“Still here.”

“You went quiet,” I said, and even inside my own head, the accusation was too close to fear.

“Listening,” Sully said.

“For what?”

“For the chain.”

My throat tightened. “And?”

“Only us.”

My breath left me in a sound I did not recognize.

Freedom was too large a word for the first breath of it. Too bright. Too clean. My mind kept flinching away from it, looking for the trick, the hook hidden under the mercy. I had known cages with open doors before. I had known bargains dressed as rescue. I had known masters who let the leash slacken just to enjoy watching me remember it was still there…

Mammon made sure I knew he was not only my boss, but my jailer, and my tormentor, and he held my very life in the palm of his hand.

So I did not feel free all at once. I felt fear take shape, reaching for something familiar and finding no handle. I felt my body remain ready to obey a command that did not come. I felt Sully's heartbeat beside mine, steady and stubborn, and the warmth of Guy's hand still ghosting around my arm where he had held me here.

Maybe freedom was not a door swinging wide. Maybe, at first, it was only this: no pull in my bones, no voice in the dark, no part of me disappearing before I chose to move. Maybe it was the terrible, impossible responsibility of belonging to myself and learning what to do with that much room.

I waited for the pull.

Nothing.

I waited for the voice.

Nothing.

I looked at the dead scar on my arm and listened to Sully’s heartbeat beside mine.

For the first time in a century, nothing pulled back.

18

Knox stared at his arm.

Everybody else stared at Knox.

I was approximately twelve seconds from falling over, because apparently saving a Dragon from a Demon Prince was bad for the knees… And the arms… And the brain… And… Well, all of me.

The room tipped half an inch to the left.