Page 190

Luna
The house is ruined. Not just broken. Not just overturned.
Ransacked.
Like someone came here not to search, but to desecrate.
The front door hangs off its hinges, jagged wood like snapped bone. Inside, the scent hits first. Blood. Burned magic. And something else. Something colder. Older.
I step across the threshold, careful not to flinch when my boots crunch glass. The living room, if you could still call it that, looks like it lost a war. The couch is split open, stuffing trailing like intestines across the floor. One of the mirrors is shattered, its silvered shards arranged in a spiral pattern that makes my stomach turn.
I don’t breathe until I reach the center of the space.
And even then, I don’t breathe deeply.
Caspian’s coat is still here. Slung over the back of the ruined chair. One sleeve is torn. Blood dried along the collar. Not his, I tell myself. Not yet.
But it’s Ambrose’s cuff I find in the hallway.
Torn from his wrist. A fragment of shadow magic still clinging to it, twitching like it doesn’t understand it’s been severed from him.
It takes me a moment.
A full, horrible moment to embrace what I already know.
They’re gone.
Caspian. Ambrose.
Taken.
I’d known before stepping back into this house. The bond hadn’t fractured, it hadn’t been made yet, but I’d felt the shift. Felt the absence. Like the world had turned too fast and left me off-kilter.
But seeing this? The violence of it. The audacity of it.
That’s different.
I stagger back into what’s left of the kitchen, palms pressed to the warped counter, trying not to put my fist through the nearest cabinet. There’s a hole in the floor near the hearth, something clawed its way out, not in. The smell rising from it is wrong. Sulfur and smoke and something that doesn’t belong in this world.
This wasn’t just a kidnapping.
It was a message. A fucking promise. And I know who sent it. I don’t want to say her name. Don’t want to give it the shape of breath.
But Severin would’ve done it clean. Strategic. Cold.
This?
This is someone who wanted me to feel it.
To hurt from it.
Someone who knows I haven’t bound Caspian or Ambrose, but still dares to touch what’s mine.
And they are mine. Even if they won’t say it. Even if I haven’t claimed them the way I did Silas or Riven. That doesn’t matter. Because I will.
And whoever thought they could take from me and walk away whole,
They’re about to learn how wrong that is.