Page 18 of The Syndicate’s Shadow Heiress (Branche de Lune Syndicate #1)

THE LOOM AND THE LURE

Kali’s Emotional State: Reluctantly obsessed. She told herself this was strategy, not longing—but her magic didn’t lie. And neither did the burn beneath her skin every time his name echoed through her blood.

T he sun hadn’t dared rise when Kali laced up her boots and snapped her shadow-threaded leathers into place. Her bones still ached. The flare hadn’t faded. But pain wasn’t weakness anymore—it was sharpening her. Honing every thought into a blade.

She’d spent the last hour lying still, trying—and failing—to meditate him out of her bloodstream. Every inhale, he lingered. Every breath out, he stayed. Not as a thought. As a truth.

Lev trailed her like a storm on a leash. Silent. Seething. He hadn’t spoken since the night before, but the weight of everything unsaid pressed against the air like pressure before a lightning strike.

Irina stood waiting in the portal hall, her portable spellboard crackling with kinetic light. Runes whirled like static.

“I isolated the signature from your collarbone,” she said without preamble. “It’s not just ancient—it’s Arcane-Rewoven. Pre-Gate War. Maybe even Loom Circle.” Thread-magic wasn’t cast. It was chosen. It found weakness and wove its way through it.

Kali raised a brow. “Translation?”

Irina flicked her fingers, and the projected image of the sigil flared red.

“Your Thread Daddy isn’t from here. Or now.”

Astraeus growled low in her skull. “He isn’t bound by time. The Loom Circle were fate-rippers—Threadweavers who rewrote prophecy like it was parchment.”

Lev’s jaw ticked. “So we’re chasing a cosmic stalker who scripts reality and wants to braid you into his bedtime story.”

Kali didn’t respond. Her eyes locked on the pulsing red dot glowing on the board.

The Bronx.

“Prep the car,” she ordered. Her voice left no room for questions.

The Vision Sequence

The warehouse sat like a mausoleum—dead concrete, rusted rail lines, static-laced glamour wards rippling across its skin.

The air here was heavier, thick with an eerie hum that felt almost alive.

Kali’s pulse quickened as she moved, a flicker of sensation prickling at her skin, like the magic was waking around her .

She stepped forward, and the world seemed to narrow—her sigil flaring in response, a burst of crimson heat beneath her collarbone. Her shadows hummed in warning, their restlessness growing as she entered the heart of the room.

The magic here was familiar. Intimate. Thread-magic.

And then—an altar.

No blood. No bones. Just a thread.

Gold and crimson spools were draped like chandeliers from the ceiling. The floor was a map—a spiral of woven runes and impossible geometry. The entire room hummed with intent, its silence pressing down on her like a suffocating weight.

Kali stepped into the center, her magic trembling in anticipation. And then everything snapped.

The Vision

A vision hit her like a kiss dipped in lightning.

She stood in a chamber of mirrors, breath ragged, skin bare. Red threads coiled around her wrists, glowing with want.

Thorne stood behind her. Shirtless. Tattoos pulsing across his chest like living prophecy.

“You came,” he breathed into her ear. “Even when you told yourself not to.”

“This isn’t real,” she said, voice trembling .

“It’s more real than the war you’re pretending doesn’t own you.”

She clenched her jaw. Her mind screamed to retreat. Her body betrayed her.

His hands skimmed her waist. One traced a thread along her ribs like a vow. The other was tangled in her hair, pulling her head back gently.

“This altar isn’t a trap, Kali. It’s a bond. A key.”

He turned her slowly and reverently. Their gazes locked—red sigil to shadow-slick soul.

“I’m not your enemy,” he whispered. “But I am your undoing.”

Then he kissed her.

It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t kind.

It was destruction….Worship….Claiming.

She tried to hold herself together. Tried to remember Lev’s voice. Astraeus’s warnings. Her own. She was a thread unraveling at the edge of a blade. And he was the hand pulling it loose.

But her magic surged toward him like it remembered something her mind refused to name. A hunger not just hers, but older. Hungrier.

And when she gasped, when her shadows trembled and her magic cracked, she didn’t fight.

Because part of her didn’t want to.

Kali snapped back like a blade into its sheath .

She hit the floor, shadows flaring around her like wildfire. Gasping. Shaking.

Irina caught her before she collapsed. Lev surged forward, blade half-drawn.

“What happened?” he demanded.

She didn’t speak.

Kali looked down.

The sigil had bloomed. The thread now curled below her breast, reaching like flame across her ribs.

Lev’s eyes caught it, and something in him cracked. He opened his mouth—but didn’t trust the words. They’d be too sharp. Too real. His mouth opened. Closed. His fists clenched like he wanted to hit something he couldn’t reach.

And in the marrow of her mind, Thorne whispered, “One more thread, Kali. One more... and you’re mine.”

The promise coiled through her blood like poison disguised as prayer. The thread shimmered as she hit the floor. Somewhere far away, it pulled taut—and Thorne felt it snap.

Thorne’s POV

But the dark didn’t care. The Mouth would open with or without consent. In the fractured light of the Loom’s inner sanctum, Thorne exhaled.

The altar had answered. The Spiral didn’t care what it consumed. And this time, it wanted her .

He felt her. Not just presence—permission. Each time he touched the thread, it frayed. And each time… it wound back to her.

The thread had spread, curling deeper into her soul. His name was tangled in her breath now, sewn into her magic.

She was unraveling. Perfectly.

And yet—beneath it all? Fear, not hers, His.

Because the Spiral Mouth was stirring. Someone was lighting fires they didn’t understand.

A candle. A curse. A call.

“She’s not ready,” he whispered to the dark.

But the dark didn’t care.

The Mouth would open with or without consent.

And Kali?

She was the key they would bleed to turn.

Thorne touched the thread humming through his chest—the one bound to hers.

“Don’t break, shadow queen,” he murmured. “Not before I find you first.”

The words left his mouth but left a wound behind.

Because the waiting was costing him pieces he might never get back.