Page 6

Chapter

Five

She’d seen him.

Loren snarled, driving his fist into the stone wall. Pain flared, bright and sharp, as he wrenched against his bindings. The runes etched into the pitted surface flared to life as he strained against them, the cruel iron biting deeply into his raw, mangled flesh.

But the chains held. They always did.

He collapsed onto the moldy straw pallet, trembling with exhaustion and rage, eyes fixed on the manacles that had bound him for half his life. They had weathered over the years, but the runes carved into their surface still gleamed with magic, making them easy to read.

Loris to bind his soul. Na’vorel to sap his strength. Na’ithra to seal away his magic. All carved into the iron that burned his flesh and chipped away at his soul.

The spells were written in Valenya, but their execution was completely, cruelly human. Between the manacles, the collar, and the years wasted in this cell, Loren’s once-formidable power had withered to almost nothing. He couldn’t summon enough aether to light a candle, and escape was a dream that had died long ago .

The shadows stirred. Loren tensed, his breath slowing as they inched closer, curling around his feet. Silent, for once. He had felt their presence for years—haunting, watching, whispering. But today… today was different.

They weren’t just watching. They were listening.

Loren gritted his teeth, glaring at the inky tendrils. “What do you want from me?” he demanded.

They didn’t answer. They never did. But for once, Loren didn’t need them to.

They had brought her to him.

It wasn’t the first time he had seen her. She had haunted him for months, slipping into his dreams like a ghost. He’d almost convinced himself she wasn’t real—just a desperate construct conjured by his mind in a last ditch effort to stave off the madness of isolation.

She never spoke. Never looked at him—not until tonight.

Loren closed his eyes, desperate to deny it even as a sick, sinking weight settled in his chest. There was only one reason magic wove fae souls together in dreams. Even now, just thinking of her stirred something deep within him—power he hadn’t felt in years, flaring to life like an ember in the dark.

This female was his mate.

Loren curled his aching hands into fists. The absent Goddess was cruel, to dangle her before him now. In another life, he would have sought her out and courted her. He would have knelt at her feet and offered her every piece of himself—his heart, his magic, his name. Everything he had would have been hers.

But in this life?

He could never acknowledge her. Could never admit her existence. Not even if the power she granted him was enough to tip the balance. Because if the Arcanum ever learned he had a mate…

They’d use her. Weaponize her. Tear her apart, piece by piece, just to see what it did to him. And if they ever completed the bond...Goddess help him, he couldn’t be responsible for what they’d do to her .

He forced the thought away, shoving it into the depths of his mind and locking it away with all his other unbearable truths, alongside the memories of his parents, his sister, his friends—all the people he had loved and failed to protect.

The best thing he could do—for both of them—was forget she ever existed.

Loren had tried to die once.

In the beginning, there had been others here. He never saw them, but their voices echoed through the dungeon—cries of pain, defiance, and desperate pleas for mercy that would never come. They had been a grim comfort, proof that he wasn’t alone in his suffering.

But one by one, they fell silent.

At first, Loren was relieved. Their suffering had ended—one way or another. But as the years dragged on, the silence seeped into his mind, a creeping, corrosive thing that stripped away even the faintest semblance of hope.

His only companions were the shadows.

They came to him the night the last voice disappeared. A slow trickle of darkness, curling through the cracks in the walls, cold and watchful. He hadn’t understood what it meant—had thought, at first, that his father had come for him.

It wasn’t until days later, when they didn’t leave but no rescue came, that Loren understood.

His father was dead. And his shadows—the ones that always followed the fae crown—they belonged to Loren now.

But they didn’t obey him.

When he ordered them to free him, they just coiled around him, useless. They slunk into the corners of his cell when his tormenters came in, watching silently as they cut into his flesh and ripped away pieces of his sanity with their never-ending questions. And when they left him bleeding and broken on the filthy floor, the shadows only drifted over him, whispering things he didn’t understand.

Eventually, Loren stopped asking them to help and begged them to kill him instead. But still, they never did anything but whisper—and wait.

Years passed.

No more voices came. Loren had never realized it was possible to feel so hollow, to ache for connection so deeply it felt like a physical wound.

And so, he had decided to end it.

He had curled up on his filthy straw pallet and rejected the rancid scraps they slid into his cell. He had relished the slow unraveling of his body, waiting for his heart to still, for his breath to stop, for death to claim him.

But Garrick Shaw had come before death.

“How long has he been like this?”

Loren barely registered the sound of the cell door opening. But at the familiar voice, his eyes flickered open, sluggish and unfocused as he forced himself to look at the man who had betrayed them all.

The shadows, predictably, were nowhere to be found.

Garrick stood just inside the doorway, studying him with a mix of disdain and calculation. He had aged—fine lines fanning out around his sharp eyes, streaks of gray threading through his dark hair—but the arrogance in his stance, the chill in his gaze, remained unchanged.

Loren hated him.

“You’re wasting your time,” the guard muttered. “He’s given up.”

Garrick’s lip curled. “Then force him to eat. If he refuses, break his jaw and feed him through a tube.”

When the cell door slammed shut, the silence was louder than ever.

How long ago had that been? Years, surely.

And now, Garrick Shaw was back. And this time, he wasn’t alone.

The younger man’s gaze swept over him, slow and assessing. “This is the prince?” He asked at last, his tone laced with curiosity. “I expected more. ”

“Don’t underestimate him,” Garrick said. “He’s been in iron for twenty-five years and he’s still alive. He’s beaten, but he has never been weak.”

Loren bared his teeth at them. Garrick would know that, wouldn’t he? After all, they’d studied side by side for years, walking the halls of the Aetherium together. Once, Loren had thought of him as a friend.

But humans had never been meant to wield the gifts of the Goddess.

And Garrick Shaw had proved why.

The younger man crouched before him, studying him with the detached curiosity of a scholar examining a broken artifact—valuable, but only if it could be fixed.

“Beautiful work,” he murmured, reaching out to trace the collar. “He’s been struggling.” His eyes flicked to Loren’s swollen wrists and the trails of dried blood on his arms. “Why cuffs? Isn’t a ly’ithra rune more effective?”

“He won’t give up his name,” for the first time Garrick sounded annoyed. “He hasn’t spoken a word to anyone Hale has sent down here to question him in about five years.”

“Impressive.” The new man sat back on his heels, grinning. “This is going to be fun.” He chuckled, turning back to Garrick. “Want to make a wager? Araya breaks the Shadowed Veil in under a year.”

Loren bit back a groan. That’s what they wanted?

The inquisitors had spent years torturing him, starving him, whispering lies in his ears—all in a futile attempt to make him reveal the secrets of the shadows.

If only they knew.

He wasn’t his father. The shadows didn’t answer to him. They watched—they whispered and waited. But they never obeyed him.

Loren exhaled slowly, pressing his head back against the cold stone. The inquisitors would be better off searching the void itself—they would find their answers sooner.

“You’ re that sure about this female?” Garrick asked. “I’m not the only one you run the risk of disappointing, Jaxon.”

Loren’s blood ran cold. Jaxon. He stared at the younger man, trying to see the dark-haired boy who had once clung to Garrick’s robes.

“Completely,” Jaxon laughed. “She thinks this whole thing is her idea.”

Garrick exhaled, rubbing his fingers over the line grooved between his eyebrows.

“You had everything set up for you,” he said. “The Eldergreen project, your own research team—it took years of planning to get you that. And you threw it away to come back and play house with a fae?—”

“You act like it was a setback.”

“It was ,” Garrick snapped. “The Eldergreen is still crawling with fae magic?—”

“Don’t be dramatic, father.” Jaxon’s jaw tightened, but his smirk remained. “You think I should have wasted another decade digging through ruins when I could be making history?”

He gestured lazily toward Loren. “I have bigger things to accomplish now.”

Garrick’s gaze sharpened. “You have things to prove.” His voice was cold, unyielding. “She’s good at what she does, but involving her in the actual work?—”

“She’s done it before.” Jaxon waved off his father’s concern. “She wasn’t supposed to, of course, but she was already doing half my work. I gave her the problem, she worked out the safest sequence, and I cast the spells. She could have saved lives in Elvanfal if the Arcanum wasn’t so shortsighted?—”

Loren’s fingers twitched, his pulse quickening as he forced himself to remain still, his head bowed in feigned disinterest. If the humans hadn’t taken the Eldergreen?—

Loren clenched his jaw, burying that ember of reckless hope before it could blaze to life. What did it matter to him? There was nothing he could do about it—not when he was chained in the dark like an animal. He’d die in this cell, one day.

“—trust me, she won’t be a problem.” Jaxon chuckled. “You should have seen her when I told her I wanted her to keep working—she’s eager to show her worth in every possible way. If she can’t break the Veil, at least she’ll keep me well entertained until I figure it out myself.”

Loren’s stomach twisted with disgust at the lewd implication. Goddess help that poor female, whoever she was.

“Is there anything else you need to see?” Garrick asked his son. “The workshop down here is fully stocked. If there’s anything you need?—”

The two men moved back to the door, knocking twice to be let out. Loren listened as their voices and laughter faded, finally leaving him in silence again.

How many years would they spend torturing him this time? Two? Five? Jaxon seemed eager to prove himself—that didn’t bode well. Loren sighed. Maybe he could antagonize Garrick’s son into finally killing him.

He was so tired. Tired of the shadows, of the cold, of the constant pressure of the iron against his skin. Tired of the despair and hopelessness. Loren was barely in his fifties. Fae lived a long time—he had at least another 200 years of this.

Loren closed his eyes, whispering another prayer to the absent Goddess for his mate. Keep her safe. Keep her hidden.

Because Loren needed her to stay far, far away from Garrick and Jaxon Shaw.