Page 23

DOMINIC

T he moment the kid was safely in the care of Markus and Rowan, Dominic needed air.

Not the “step-outside-for-a-smoke” kind. Not the “check-the-perimeter” kind either. He needed the kind of air that wrapped cold around your ribs and reminded you that you were still alive. That you still had something to lose.

So he slipped out the back of P ines and Needles , letting the creaky screen door snap shut behind him, and took the path behind the herb garden that led toward the tree line. The evening had shifted to night. The stars were out. The moon was high and fat and watching.

He leaned a shoulder against a pine, folding his arms and staring off into the dark.

Magic still buzzed along his skin—residue from the spellwork they’d done on the boy.

Or maybe it was just the echo of her —Lillith, her hands pressed to his, her magic singing in tune with his like they were born to work that way.

And yet she still hadn’t said it.

Not the word. Not even the admission. Not even the breath of a promise. The way she seemed to see him as if he were the only steady thing in her world—and then went silent.

He wanted to understand.

But tonight? He just needed space.

He hadn’t meant to walk past the thirty-foot limit. It just… happened.

The bond didn’t sting. Didn’t yank. Didn’t burn.

He frowned and checked the distance. Definitely more than thirty feet now. Still nothing.

The air shifted behind him.

Too quiet. Too still.

His instincts screamed a beat too late.

Dominic spun, claws half-formed—and slammed into a wall of icy, glamoured magic. It hit like a thunderclap. Not pain, not exactly. More like falling into a pool of silence, cold and heavy and empty. Like the air had been stolen from his lungs and the earth had dropped out beneath him.

He roared—half-lion, half-man—but no sound reached his throat. His limbs locked. His knees buckled.

A hand grabbed his arm. Slender, pale, and adorned in rings of silver thorns. The touch wasn’t gentle—it seared through his skin like it belonged to another realm entirely.

Dominic jerked, tried to shift fully, to release the lion that lived inside his blood—but something old and slippery coiled through his nerves, rooting him still. It was like drowning in someone else’s nightmare.

“Dominic Kane,” purred a voice like velvet smoke, cold and taunting.

He thrashed, but his body wasn’t his. He gritted his teeth, forcing his muscles to obey—but paralysis magic soaked through him, ancient and coiled like a vice around his spine. His claws flexed just an inch before going numb.

Glamour shimmered around him, distorting the trees, the sky, the stars. Like looking through fogged glass underwater.

The world bent.

The last thing he saw was the faint glow of Pines and Needles through the trees—and he couldn’t even call her name.

He crashed into the ground with a thud that rattled bone. His shoulder screamed. The magic held.

Dominic woke in a ring of mushrooms and broken moonlight. The clearing stank of sweet rot, moss, and blood magic. The glamour was heavy here, coiling around his senses, twisting light and space until up felt sideways and his breath came too shallow.

Chains of runes glowed faintly across the circle’s edge—barriers. Not just to keep others out.

To keep him in.

His muscles strained against invisible cords, every inch of him screaming to shift, to fight. But the magic was stronger than brute force—it was woven with intent, twisted to his name.

He was trapped.

Thaloryn stood in the center, silver hair drifting like fog, his eyes burning with that eerie, otherworldly glow. His presence pressed against Dominic like a second atmosphere.

“Welcome,” the fae prince said smoothly, the smile he wore brittle and thin. “To your cage.”

Dominic bared his teeth, his voice gravel. “Come in here without your spells, see how long you last.”

Thaloryn laughed an elegant, hollow sound that didn’t touch his eyes. “Still the lion, even declawed. Charming.”

“You think glamour and tricks make you powerful?” Dominic snapped. “I’ve fought worse than you with nothing but my fists and rage.”

The prince tilted his head, expression unreadable. “Yes. But rage won’t save you now. Not from this.”

He raised his hands, and the runes along the perimeter sparked. Sigils of bone and ash flared to life, forming a lattice in the air that hummed with layered incantations.

“You and Lillith,” he said, weaving with sharp flicks of his fingers, “share a bond that should not exist. A bond that was not mine to forge… but is now mine to unravel.”

“Touch her,” Dominic growled, his chest heaving against the paralysis, “and I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.”

“Oh, I’m not touching her.” Thaloryn’s voice dropped to a hush. “I’m freeing her.”

Then the pain hit. Not heat. Not cold. Something deeper.

It wasn’t his body, it was his soul.

Something inside him, deep, raw, essential, was pulled taut and ripped. The bond. The tether. It howled as it snapped, a soundless scream that reverberated through every bone in his body.

Dominic collapsed. His palms hit the dirt. He gasped, not from air loss, but from the sudden absence. It was gone.

Her warmth. The constant tether between them. The magnetic hum beneath his skin. It had vanished like smoke.

He gagged on the void it left behind.

Thaloryn crouched beside him, too close, fingers still glowing from the spellwork.

“Now,” the fae prince whispered, brushing ash from Dominic’s jaw, “you can walk away. Return to your pride. To your solitary, hollow life. Once I free you from this place that is.”

Dominic forced himself upright, trembling with rage. “You think cutting me loose wins you something?”

“Oh, it wins everything.” Thaloryn stood. “She’ll feel the loss. But she’ll interpret it as freedom . And you? You’ll feel nothing but the hole.”

Dominic surged forward—and was slammed down by another binding rune that lit up beneath him. It singed his wrists, his calves, his shoulders, pinning him like an insect in a fae hunter’s trap.

“She’ll doubt what she felt,” Thaloryn continued, voice distant now, almost wistful.

“She’ll convince herself it was the magic.

That none of it was real. That’s what you mortals do when you’re scared of truth.

You call it enchantment. And worse? She will think that you chose to leave because the bond was broken, reinforcing to her that this was all just… magic. ”

“You broke the bond,” Dominic rasped, “but you didn’t break me.”

Thaloryn’s smile faded. “No,” he said. “But I don’t have to.”

With a flourish, the prince flicked his wrist.

The runes sealed. The air compressed.

The fae vanished in a shimmer of moonlit smoke.

Dominic screamed into the silence, muscles burning against the restraints. His lion clawed at his insides, roaring in fury, but the wards didn’t budge.

He slumped back against the moss, breath ragged, heart hollow.

Not broken. But unmoored.

For the first time since the bond tethered them, he couldn’t feel her. And that was worse than any cage.

Back at Pines and Needles , the bond had vanished like it had never been.

And Lillith?

Lillith would wake and feel nothing.