Page 14 of Golden Bond (Pleasure Palace #1)

Chapter

Seven

AUREN

T he first time I bonded, I was eighteen.

The second, barely twenty.

The third was last summer, and that one nearly broke me.

A failed bond doesn’t dissolve with ceremony.

It rots. Quietly. Itches somewhere beneath the ribs where no salve can reach.

Turns affection to ache, touch to poison.

In time, it feels like a wound that refuses to close.

You stop sleeping. You stop breathing properly.

Your body remains whole, but something inside you buckles and howls until the rite is severed or the madness takes root.

I’ve never made it to the end of a cycle.

So I watched him.

Callis.

The boy in my bed. The boy at my table. The boy with skin kissed by temple sun and a voice like an unwritten hymn.

He sat in the curve of the lounge, one leg drawn beneath him, a loose robe gathered around his hips.

The fabric slid off one shoulder like it had been charmed to follow the line of his collarbone.

He was quiet, blinking against the morning light that poured through the high windows and dappled across his chest. His curls were still damp. He smelled like rosewater and sleep.

He reached for a grape.

The motion was simple, but it slowed the room.

He plucked it from the carved silver stem and brought it to his lips—not quickly, not carelessly, just… gently. He bit, and I watched the juice bead on his lower lip before his tongue swept it away. My own breath caught.

It shouldn’t have affected me like that.

It wasn’t lewd. It wasn’t even intentional. He didn’t glance at me or offer a smile. He simply reached for another.

I turned toward the window.

The chambers felt too small suddenly. The air too close. I didn’t trust myself to stay in that room. Not with the weight of what I wanted pressing hot and reckless behind my ribs.

He deserved gentleness. Time. He deserved a bond that didn’t pull apart at the seams.

But the clock had already started. One cycle. One moon. If this failed, there wouldn’t be another.

I stood, careful not to let my expression shift.

“There’s fresh bread if you want more,” I said without turning. “And the courtyard should be quiet if you need air. ”

I felt his eyes on my back.

Then I walked out, before I could do something stupid—like kneel beside him and kiss the juice from his mouth. Like press my hand to his chest and ask him to lie back just once more.

Like beg.

The garden path shimmered with dew, soft underfoot, the scent of crushed lavender rising with every step. My sandals made no sound against the stone.

The Temple of Aerius stood open to the morning, a sweep of pale columns veiled in flowering vines.

Sunlight spilled down its western face, catching in the blue-glass mosaics that depicted the sacred roots of the world.

This was the wing that faced the rising light.

This was the wing from which, if the day was right, one could see the Bridge to the Gods.

A mirage, perhaps, or a trick, but in the mist and the infusion of hope, many claimed to see the flicker of what our bonds and our rituals built.

I came often before the others stirred—not for favor or recognition.

As a Thorn of the Verdant Path, my duty was to tend to the slow things.

Growth. Ceremony. The discipline of presence.

Where others burned bright and fast, we held.

We cultivated. In time, the temple might name a Thorn who had proven his steadiness a Vinekeeper—a title of both fire and calm regard.

A keeper of bonds. A guide. That was the next step I wanted.

Nothing more.

Not yet one of the Elders, not a Flame on the High Council. That kind of authority required years .

But I was running out of time.

Four bonds. Three cycles broken.

Each had ended differently. One with kindness, another in quiet disappointment, the last without a word.

But the feeling that followed was always the same.

Like an itch beneath the sternum. A splinter that refused to dislodge.

Then pressure. Then pain. A slow-burning ache that rooted itself deep and made even ritual unbearable.

It twisted the bond into something poisonous.

Callis didn’t know that yet. And gods willing, he wouldn’t have to.

He had looked up at me this morning—barefoot, fresh from washing his face, a light robe clinging to one shoulder—and asked if he could return to the Temple of Aerius for scribing work.

He’d sounded tentative, hopeful. Said he liked old myths.

Liked the stories from the Old Cycle. His voice was steady, but there was a tension beneath it.

A need to be useful. A need to be seen as more than someone who had been taken into a bond.

I’d said yes.

I told him I would speak to the scribes. That he could use the copying chambers between devotions.

I hadn’t told him that I knew those myths by heart. That I’d once dreamed of writing treatises on the Cycle’s lost parables. That I still memorized ancient prayers on cold nights when sleep refused to come.

Because if I had told him—if I’d spoken too eagerly, too warmly—he might have looked at me the way they always did. Like I wanted too much. So I hadn’t said it. I’d only nodded.

The scent of incense thickened as I stepped into the inner sanctum. Here, within the temple’s half-circle of stone, other Thorns had gathered. Our robes brushed the floor like water. No one spoke. We didn’t need to. The rite was beginning.

At the center of the chamber lay the altar: a massive block of sunstone veined in living gold.

Its surface was warm even before the rays of the sun reached it, as if it remembered the heat of all the mornings before.

A ring of shallow channels surrounded it, carved with the names of the gods and filled with dark incense.

The brazier was lit. The smoke rose.

One by one, we pressed our palms to the sunstone.

I felt it then.

Callis.

His presence trembled like a note held too long, like breath caught behind the ribs. The bond had taken root. Not deep—not yet—but enough to feel. A pulse at the base of my spine. A line of warmth strung through the hollow places.

I saw him again in my mind, curled beneath the silk canopy, chest rising gently in sleep. I had watched him longer than I meant to. The space between us hadn’t been crossed, not after the ritual, not even with our bodies so near. And yet something had shifted.

The chant began.

Low at first. Just breath and vibration.

The wine was poured, dark and steaming, into a wide ceremonial bowl. It passed from hand to hand. Each Thorn sipped in turn. When it reached me, I paused, held it close, and inhaled.

Let this bond hold. Let me not ruin it. Let me be enough.

I drank.

The chant faded into silence. The air stilled. And as the rite ended, I bowed low and stepped back into the temple’s gardens. The light had changed. Warmer now, painted in streaks across the stone path.

Somewhere back in the apartments, Callis was likely preparing for the day’s work.

The garden path shimmered again beneath my steps, damp with dew that had yet to lift.

Beyond the arch of the Temple’s outer cloister, vines braided up the columns and stretched lazily across the lattice overhead.

I let my fingers skim the petals of a trailing bloom—velvety white, perfumed faintly with clove—and then stepped out onto the broader terrace.

“Your face says the rite worked,” came a familiar voice. “Your shoulders say otherwise.”

I turned, unsurprised.

Corin leaned against the carved railing, his posture loose, one sandal braced against the stone.

His robes were open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms inked faintly with devotion lines—old blessings from a rite long passed.

His hair—darker than mine, always unruly—was still damp from the bathhouse.

He looked as he always had in the mornings: casual, sharp-eyed, too perceptive for comfort .

He arched a brow. “Well?”

“It worked,” I said. “The bond is… formed.”

“That’s what they all say at first.” He pushed off the railing and fell into step beside me as I moved toward the inner garden wall. “Then comes the waiting. The unraveling. The clinging. The madness.”

I shot him a dry look. “Is this supposed to be a blessing?”

“Don’t be precious, Auren. You know I wish you well.”

I did. But his tongue was too quick to let sincerity stand alone.

We crossed into the shade of the tall olive trees that curled around the garden’s western edge said to be over two thousand years old, where the air smelled of crushed thyme and the faint bitterness of fig leaves.

Here, sunlight splintered through high trellises, and the hush of the temple deepened.

Corin cast me a sidelong glance. “This is your fourth.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And how is he?”

That question I didn’t answer right away. How was Callis? Still, searching. Tender, but distant. A boy with a cautious soul and a bond that fluttered in my chest like a bird that hadn’t decided whether to land or flee.

“New,” I said at last.

Corin gave a knowing hum, as if that one word told him everything. “They always are.”

We walked in silence for a while, the stones warm beneath our feet as if we wore no sandals, our serets whispering softly with each step.

“You’re not what I expected,” I said.

“Mm?”

“Still unbonded. After Beren.”

Corin gave a low sigh and bent to examine a bush of silver-leaved rue, pinching off a sprig with the absentminded care of a scholar. “Beren was… good. But it was an easy bond. No friction, no fear. I think that’s worse, in some ways.”

“Worse?”

He straightened and met my gaze. “It didn’t stretch. It didn’t teach. It made me comfortable. And I don’t want to live my life in comfort.”

“You turned down the renewal?”

“With kindness. And a feast.” A half-smile curved his lips. “He wept, but not because he loved me. Because he thought he should.”