Page 14

Ellison shook me awake in the early hours of dawn, or at least, I thought it was dawn.

The pounding in my head made time feel irrelevant. The dim light filtering through the door’s crack did little to clarify the hour, but I could tell by the way my body ached that sleep had been a rare, broken thing.

After getting branded, two sleepless nights had blurred together into one endless ache. Even Rok siphoning my flame hadn’t strengthened me. If anything, it had left me weaker.

“Giesel says a week into the initiation to be a guard worsens,” Ellison muttered. “Today’s the final test. The trust test.”

“We—I didn’t even pass the second one,” I said, glancing at Giesel asleep in the corner, curled in on herself like a wilting flower.

Blinking against the dizziness, I forced myself to my feet. The world spun in sick, slow circles. Maybe Archer would claim me as his guard sooner than later. The thought was almost funny.

As we left the dungeons, the first slice of sunlight nearly blinded me as I stepped from the cellar’s choking dark. Fresh air hit my lungs, so clean it hurt, and for a moment I just stood there, gasping like someone who had been drowning .

I didn’t know how brutal the final test would be. Maybe this was it. Maybe they’d finally see that whatever forbidden quell lived inside me had already burned out.

Now, standing in line with fifty other recruits, I heard Rok’s voice cut through the low hum of the courtyard.

“Guards,” he barked. “For your final trial of initiation, you’ll be matched with another through a forged bond.”

A murmur swept through the line. And we all had the same thought, what in the realms was a forged bond?

Rok paused, eyes sweeping over us. “The rules are simple. No names. No details that reveal who you are. Your first task is to trust without history. You have one week to expose your partner. If they expose you first, you’ll face the consequences.”

Kian raised a hand. “You’re forcing us into bonds? Like mind bonds?”

Rok ignored him. “The person you bond with becomes your other half. You will hear their thoughts, feel their moods. Their anger, their exhaustion. These bonds are essential for fieldwork. Prove you can handle one, and you’ll be sorted into a rider bond with the elite guards.”

Several initiates stiffened. Most of them wore the proud, sharp-boned look of Demetria blood. A sick feeling twisted in my gut. If I bonded with one of them—if they figured out who I really was—it would all be over.

Rok moved down the line, hovering his hand over each recruit. When he reached me, he hesitated. Then a pressure bloomed in my skull, slow and suffocating.

Next was Kian. He paled immediately, grimacing like someone had driven a spike through his temple.

The sensation was strange and heavy, as if the threads of the bond were being pulled too tight. I waited for a voice, for anything. But my mind stayed quiet.

Still, I reached out. “Hello? ”

Could Archer feel this? Could he sense the strange, foreign bond being forced on me? I hadn’t felt him in a week. Not since they locked me in that cell. I was certain now. There had to be a ward in that dungeon, something keeping the outside world barred.

I tried again. “Hello? Is anyone else in my mind?”

Still nothing.

Just another test. Another cruel design meant to break me. To fail me. To leave me like Giesel, forgotten and locked away for years.

Then it happened. The pressure built behind my eyes, a slow, tightening pull, like invisible wards were coiling through my skull.

“Hello, Severyn.” But it was my own voice echoing through the bond.

I stiffened. They knew me.

“Do you hear someone?” I asked Kian beside me.

He winced, two fingers pressed to his temple. “Mine’s loud,” he muttered. “And screaming.”

“They know who I am,” I whispered. “How is that fair?”

The bond wound tighter around my thoughts, pressing into every corner of my mind. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Why do you assume my name is Severyn?” I asked.

“Is it not?”

I scoffed. “You’re cheating. Probably some royal guard who begged Rok to pair us together because I’m Charles’s sister.”

“Play the game, Severyn.”

I scanned the grand hall, trying to catch someone watching too closely. “What game?”

“A guessing game. Ask me questions. Let’s get to know each other better. ”

I gritted my teeth. This was the most ridiculous thing I had ever done, but I wasn’t willing to face whatever consequences Rok had in mind. “Fine. What’s your favorite color?” I asked.

“Emerald-green. Sometimes black.”

Night-born. No questions about that. “Are you looking at me?”

“Always.”

“Have I met you before?”

The voice laughed. And somehow, it was worse that it sounded like my own—only colder, more cynical.

“That would give me away.”

I forced the bond shut. Felt the snap like a string pulled too tight and then severed. Silence rushed in, filling the space where that voice had lived.

I turned to Kian. “This is ridiculous.”

He cracked one eye open, his head resting against the stone. “Yeah, Sevy. Pretty sure mine only knows how to scream.”

“Shut them out,” I said. “I did.”

He groaned. “Thanks for the tip. I tried. They forced it back open.”

Across the grand hall, Rok raised his voice. “One more thing. Let me introduce your new lead guard, Callum. He will be overseeing this test, as I’ve been taken off recruits due to some… personal matters.”

The iron door creaked open, and a towering figure stepped through.

His gold hair was glazed with frost, but it was his face that stopped my breath.

His jaw had been mended with steel and wire.

Blistered skin stretched over scars that looked half-healed, half-burning.

The poison had eaten through parts of him, but I still knew those silver eyes.

Kian winced. “Shit. Remind me never to piss him off.”

Callum was alive .

And I knew, with a sick certainty, the voice in my mind had been his.