Page 22 of The Syndicate’s Shadow Heiress (Branche de Lune Syndicate #1)

THE MEMORY HE STOLE

Kali’s Emotional State: Outwardly composed, inwardly spiraling. The bloodshed brought her time, not peace. And guilt moves quietly than rage. She’s drowning in failure and shame, and it tastes like blood she didn’t mean to spill.

T

he Senator had died exactly as she intended..

A slow death. A precise death. Shadows fed through his lungs like silk turned to razors, each thread dragging a confession from his bones. He had betrayed her. He had sold Syndicate coordinates for a seat at Belladonna’s table, and Kali had made sure he choked on it.

But the moment his spine cracked, and the light died in his eyes, something slipped, not from the room, from her.

A memory…Not his, not hers, not entirely.

Something too warped to belong to her and too vivid to have been imagined. It sank teeth into the soft places of her mind and dragged her backward, into the sanctum, into silence, into the mirror she’d been taught never to touch alone.

The obsidian surface pulsed under her palm. It wasn’t a reflection. It was a wound, stitched shut with old magic and bad intentions. Her breath fogged against it, and her voice came out low, almost reverent .

Show me what he stole.

The mirror didn’t answer.

The shadows did, the air twisted.

She was younger. Thirteen. Knees scraped. Shadows flickering at her back like nervous birds. A man, hooded, chanting in Zarokian, hovered over a blood-stained altar. Not the Senator. But his voice… his cadence.

The girl on the slab was barely breathing. No name. No scream. Just wide, empty eyes and a chest rising too slowly.

Kali’s younger self stood in the circle, repeating the words, not understanding them. Just obeying.

She jolted back in her body; the ritual had been real. But it hadn’t felt wrong then. It had felt like… obedience.

Astraeus’s voice broke through the spiral. “Stop.”

He stood behind her, every inch of him coiled shadow and silver fury. His tail twitched once, lashing smoke through the sanctum’s lower wards.

“I remembered something,” she whispered. “Something I never should have forgotten.”

“You were made to forget.”

Her jaw clenched. “By who?”

He hesitated. Too long.

Not who .

What.

Astraeus’s silence brought the second memory flooding forward. Unbidden. Crystal sharp.

She was thirteen again, trailing after her grandfather through the courtyard of the Syndicate headquarters. Both hellhounds—Vaerkyn and Varyiss- walked beside them, tails twitching in the summer heat. Silas was still in the car, engine idling.

She had been sulking, being petty, testing boundaries like a normal girl with aching knees and a spine full of defiance.

She never saw it coming.

The air split, and a creature materialized, tall and vaguely human-shaped, its skin charred with sigils that burned green and red. Its hands weren’t hands, they were blades. And its eyes were too wide, too ancient.

It lunged for her.

Her shadows reacted first, flaring in defense, blasting the thing in the face. It screamed, a sound like bone cracking underwater.

Then came her grandfather…One breath…. One movement. He was on it. Grabbed it by the back of its misshapen neck and twisted. The thing’s head tore free with a wet pop. The hellhounds descended, ripping it limb from limb.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t turn away .

She watched, awestruck and reverent, as justice was measured without apology.

What she didn’t know until later was that Astraeus and Silas had telepathically warned her grandfather the moment it appeared. That the wards had been tampered with. That the creature, later named a Zethrakh, had been sent by Azareal himself.

It had been her first real lesson in what the Syndicate protected her from. And what it allowed her to become.

Kali’s breath returned in slow, calculated pulls.

She wasn’t unraveling.

She was remembering. Not just what the Senator tried to steal… But what her bloodline had always known.

You protect the people you love. And when someone betrays them, you don’t hesitate.

“I remember now,” she whispered.

Astraeus’s tail curled protectively around her ankle. He didn’t speak.

She turned from the mirror, her voice a blade.

“He didn’t steal a memory.”

She stepped forward. Chin held high. Heart steady…… “He reminded me who the fuck I am.”