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Her smile reassures me that I’m not probing too deeply. “Ask away. I wish I had someone to talk to before I was Bonded to Bruton’s triad. It wouldn’t have changed my decision, but it would have prepared me. Knowledge is power.”

“I’m scared. I’m scared the Bond’s going to wipe out everything that’sme.That the only thing I’m going to care about is getting pregnant by those three.” I look down at the floor, fixing my attention on an errant piece of crumpled paper with furious notes scribbled on it.

“Hmm. Give me a second,” she says, as her smart-watch blinks. “A sim just completed, I need to update the next one, sorry,” she says, and a string of data feeds into a holo-vid against the wall. She blinks twice, and it disappears, only visible to her as she concentrates deeply. “Okay, all done. Look, it’s not like that. When I was Bonded to Bruton, the first times we slept together, I couldn’t get pregnant. It requires this… surrender, this wanting. I was too terrified that Bruton was going to gorunning off to war, that he’d die on the frontlines and make me a widow with his child. It wasn’t until he told me he would stay here, on Colossus, that my body would even let me become pregnant. The Bond works differently than you’d think. It doesn’t force you to do anything.”

I breath out a sigh of relief. “That’s… that’s reassuring. The rumors of the Bond are terrifying.”

“They’re half right. I don’t want to be too vulgar here, but you deserve the full picture. From a scientific perspective, the Bond functions crudely with positive reinforcement. For me, it’s dormant right now, because I’m with child. Now it’s shaping me physically, preparing my body for birth. But when it was active… I could have a passing thought about Bruton, or imagine kissing Tarik, or… anything tiny like that, and I’d get a flood of what feels like the most potent rush of dopamine and oxytocin you can imagine. It’s not a chemical process though. I did a brain scan and—oh sorry, I won’t bore you with the mechanics of it.” She runs her hand over her baby bump, and I see this peace in her, this completeness. “I don’t know if you want kids, Adriana, but I did. And whenever I imagined getting pregnant from them… it intensified the need to levels I could barely believe.”

“It sounds like it’s fucking with your mind.”

“My situation was different than yours. I lost my triad. I thought they were gone in the Rift, trapped in that place and…” She gets teary eyed and grabs a tissue, wiping her face. “Sorry, hormones. I thought they were gone, and when they came back from that darkness, all I wanted was to feel them in my mind. There was no hesitation. I wanted to link myself to them and never lose them again.”

I reach out, gently stroking her hand. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“It’s okay. It’s over now, and nothing’s going to take them away from me again. Nothing.”

“It feels like the biggest decision of my life,” I say, pulling my hand back and crossing my arms.

“It is. Look, all my life, all I wanted was to understand reality,” she says, running her hand over the simple wood of the desk, staring at it as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world. She knocks her knuckles against it. “I remember thinking as a kid that I didn’t have enough time. Now I’ve got thousands of years. And the more I study things, the more I realize how little I know. Why? Why are there immutable laws of nature, and how does the Rift function outside of them? The Bond has elevated me. In a million ways. I can do a handstand, and I’ve never trained gymnastics. I can do multiplication in my mind, plot functions that I would have needed a computer to work out. And my memory… I can remember things so clearly, it’s like I’m there. Birthdays parties with my family, hugging my mom, I can imagine the time I fell off my bike so intensely my leg pangs. How can I explain it? It’s like if my brain was a computer, it wasn’t connected properly. The Bond rearranged it, put new pathways. And every time I sleep with my triad, the effect gets stronger.”

I shiver. “Right back to positive reinforcement. You fuck your triad, you get rewarded. Sorry. That was crude. I’m sure I’m less diplomatic than you were expecting.”

Evelyn seems to come back to the room after she was lost in her deep thoughts on reality. “Crude, and half true. I wouldn’t go back to life before the Bond. No way. It’s made my life so much richer. And I’m connected to my triad in a way I never could have imagined. I can bounce ideas on them, just feel them…” She smiles, warm and natural. “Humans are alone. You just don’t realize how alone you were until you share your mind with the three people you love. Right now, I can tell that Bruton’s intensely focused on whatever Doman is saying. Huh.” Her brows furrow, and her smile weakens, concern painting herface. “Tarik and Griffon are returning from the factories. That’s strange, they were going to stay overnight. Whatever Bruton and Doman are talking about, it must be serious.”

I swallow, a pang of guilt shooting through me.

She has her happy ending here, pregnant by her triad, focused on her dream research.

And I’m going threaten everything she built, everything she suffered for. I’m bringing chaos into stability.

“There’s something eating me up.”

“What is it? You know what’s going on?”

I nod.

“Doman’s telling Bruton about our plan. We’re breaking Fay out. On my wedding day.”

Evelyn’s face goes pale.

36

PRINCE DOMAN

“You’re going to break out Obsidian’s Mate.” Bruton’s dark blue eyes flash, and the words are spoken with reverence, like the simple act of verbalizing it sets it in motion. He listened to me, and when I was done, he paused for ten long seconds in silence before replying.

In the dim, warm glow of Bruton’s bar, the amber swirl of his whisky mirrors the turmoil in his eyes. He takes it well—no crystal glasses thrown, no yelling at me to get out, no smart-watch messages to my parents to stop my plan before it can even start.

But he’s tense, the lines on his face clearer. He knows what I’m asking.

I’m asking him to risk everything.

“I do. With or without you. Say the word, and I’ll never speak on this again. Pretend I never said anything, and I won’t involve you further.”

He sets his glass down and rubs his temples. “This is a little fucking different than when we stole cakes from the bakers growing up.” He downs his glass and refills it from the crystal carafe.

The bar has tall, rectangular windows that look out to the gardens below, to the small grove of trees within the walls of his manor. My crystal glass, filled with whisky I’ve only tasted a sip of, rests on the cool, smooth surface of the marble countertop, which contrasts against the dark wood of the walls and floor.