Page 28 of The Syndicate’s Shadow Heiress (Branche de Lune Syndicate #1)
SHADOW-BOUND AND brEAKING
Kali’s Emotional State: Split at the seams—burning from the inside with power she can’t contain. The shadows obey, but they also tempt. She craves control, is terrified of surrender, and is caught between desire and duty.
T
he ritual room smelled of ash and lightning. Kali stood barefoot inside a ring of iron and bone, runes scrawled across the floor in jet black ink. At her center: Solen, shirtless, scarred, and still as a statue. The magic in the room tasted like a storm holding its breath.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
Solen tilted his head. “Because you’re close to tipping into something terrible. And I want to see who survives it, you or the world.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she began the rite anyway.
Astraeus paced above, high in the rafters. Watching. Judging.
Kali chanted in Zarokian, her voice like a knife wrapped in silk: “Sevek'tari ondrin'val. Dros'mek ai'surak. (Let the shadow rise and the veil burn.)
Shadows rose around them both, reaching, tasting. Solen didn’t flinch. His magic met hers like oil meeting fire, slippery, consuming, dangerous .
He answered her chant in Zarokian, deep and resonant: “ Ish’valen kruun'sa. Reth'kai in'dar. (I will meet the storm and wear its crown)
It wasn’t a bond. It was a collision.
Their auras crashed like storms across sea cliffs. The air pulsed. Glass cracked. One of the braziers imploded.
Kali gritted her teeth. “You’re holding back.”
Solen stepped forward, into the ring, shadows crawling over his collarbone. “So are you,” he said, but this time, his voice cracked, just slightly. Enough to let her see the thread of danger—or doubt—beneath all that poise.
They moved at the same time. Magic flared like black sunfire. Their hands collided midair, palms sparking with runes that weren’t in any known language.
She felt it then, that pre-bond pull. Like gravity shifting. Like fate hooking its claws beneath her ribs.
She hated how good it felt, but her concentration cracked.
Lev’s aura burned through the door like a warning. She could feel him out there, watching. Waiting. Not interfering… yet.
Her hands trembled.
“Another’s magic clings to yours,” Solen said softly. “A storm barely leashed. You haven’t claimed him… yet.”
Kali didn’t answer. But her pulse betrayed her.
Just then, Irina burst through the warded doors, blood on her cloak .
“You sure you want to do this?” Irina asked. “Because Lev’s outside pacing like he wants to kill something—with a pulse.”
Kali blinked hard, forcing her hands to be steady. Her heart twisted, caught between gravity wells. Solen’s voice tethered her forward; Lev’s fury threatened to pull her back. Her throat tightened—not with fear, but the weight of choosing.
Solen’s voice dropped again. “You fear me.”
“No,” she said, shadows wrapping tighter around her spine. “I fear what I’d become if I stopped.”
An enforcer appeared behind Irina, weapon drawn. “They’re moving fast. This wasn’t recon. This was a map search.”
Kali’s heartbeat surged.
She turned to Irina. “Prepare the tether.”
Irina froze. “You sure?”
“I want a failsafe if one of us breaks.”
Astraeus dropped from the rafters, his wings flickering in and out of form, landing between Kali and Solen.
“You’re fraying,” he whispered into her mind. “Shadow isn’t a shield if you forget who you are beneath it.”
Kali clenched her fists tighter, grounding herself. The judgment in his voice stung deeper than she'd expected. Not because it was cruel. Because it sounded like something Silas would’ve said—right before dragging her back from the edge.
Astraeus lowered his massive head, snout tapering to smoke and shadow, and brushed it against her shoulder, an echo of comfort from something that could have crushed her instead. Her fingers twitched, as if her body remembered softness even when her soul had forgotten how.
Kali steadied herself. She whispered, “We’re running out of time.”
Astraeus tightened his coil around her soul, voice breaking through the storm. "Little shadow," he whispered, "even iron shatters."
Kali gritted her teeth against the ache splitting her ribs.
I won’t break, she swore inside the hollow of herself. I won’t.
But the magic didn’t answer with strength.
It answered with silence.
And Kali, heart torn between war and bond, fear and fire—finally felt the weight of what it meant to walk the line between them.