Page 37 of The Syndicate’s Shadow Heiress (Branche de Lune Syndicate #1)

GHOSTS OF THE GATE

Kali's Emotional State: Fractured resolve cloaked in command. She's upright, she's armored, she's giving orders—but inside? She's bleeding from truths not yet spoken, choices not yet made.

K

ali woke with her cheek pressed to cold stone.

The Hollow Gate chamber was empty. Quiet.

Too quiet. Her breath tasted like ash and starlight.

Every nerve in her body buzzed with phantom fire, the aftermath of the flare leaving her ribs tight and her joints aching like cursed iron had been poured into her marrow.

She stood slowly, one hand pressed to the floor, the other curled in a fist tight enough to crack skin.

She didn’t remember collapsing.

She remembered Solen’s eyes, his voice.

“One must be unmade.”

The Gate had spoken.

“But what the fuck did it mean?”

She didn’t have time to fall apart. She closed her fist again. Steady enough. Angry enough. That would have to do.

Not when the Gate might do it first .

Astraeus wasn’t inside the chamber, but his scent lingered- like smoke, like memory. Her dragon was watching.

“Irina,” she said, her voice low but firm.

A heartbeat later, a door slammed open.

Irina stood framed in the threshold, geared up, daggers gleaming at her hips, eyes scanning Kali like a medic on a battlefield.

“You’re late,” Kali said.

Irina leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed, deadpan.

"Took you long enough, drama queen. Some of us thought we were gonna have to start stitching your stubborn ass back together with fishing wire and spite."

Kali exhaled sharply. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a threat.

“Prep the war table. We’re not waiting for Spiral to make the next move. We are the next move.”

Irina nodded once, a slow, wolfish grin curling her mouth.

"You got it, boss. But if you faceplant mid-battle plan, I’m tying you to the table and calling it a strategy."

Irina’s voice carried the usual bite, but the edge was too polished, too practiced. As Kali moved past her, Irina’s hand ghosted toward her arm, then paused, the smallest, sharpest hesitation .

“You sure you’re steady?” she muttered, softer now.

Not a lieutenant’s question. A sister’s.

Kali didn’t stop walking. “Define steady,” she said, voice edged with weariness and dry as ash.

“Physically, I’m stitched together with salve, sarcasm, and sheer spite.

Emotionally, I’m a one-woman landslide. But functionally?

I’m walking into hell with shadow magic and a temper, and if I drop, Heffa, you better drag my ass back and staple me upright with whatever spell tape you’ve got.

I’m not leaving you to face this end-of-days circus alone.

You don’t get to finish this fight without me. Not again.”

Irina snorted, the tension easing by half a breath, but she didn’t speak right away. She just stood there, shoulders squared like a soldier, eyes soft like a grave.

The silence between them stretched, thick with everything they hadn’t said and all the scars that didn’t show.

Then, quietly, like it cost her something to admit, she said, “You’re all I’ve got left that didn’t try to break me, Kali.

So, if you fall, I swear, I’ll burn down the world just to find the thread that holds you, and I’ll pull you back myself. ”

“Exactly,” Kali said, though her voice dipped, just slightly, frayed at the edges before she caught it and pulled it back like a blade sliding home.

Her shadows stirred behind her, restless, sensing the weight between them.

The air buzzed with that pre-storm tension, too heavy to ignore. She didn’t turn around, didn’t need to.

A crooked smile tugged at her lips as she added, “You think I’d have it any other way? Come on, menace, If I’m going down, I’m dragging you with me. Matching emotional damage or nothing.”

She didn’t see the look Irina gave her back.

But she felt it. Something heavier than loyalty. Something closer to grief disguised as faith.

The war room pulsed as Kali entered, lit by bloodlight sigils, lined with relics still humming with old war songs, crowned by a slowly rotating model of the Hollow Gate, flickering with violet flame.

Lev looked up first. His expression was carved from stone. But the second her shadow brushed his, the bond between them pulled tight, a tether fraying from too many moments that almost meant something.

"You okay?" he asked, eyes tracking the way her shadow curled like a threat. He didn’t step closer.

Kali didn’t answer .

Instead, she lifted her hand, and darkness rippled from her fingers like liquid intent, coiling across the war table, carving one undeniable shape: the Ashen Spire.

"We end it there," she said, voice flat, final. "Azareal thinks we’re fractured. Good. Let him think it."

From the far shadows, Solen’s voice rolled low and unshakable:

"And the cost?"

A low rumble echoed through the stone walls—Astraeus, pacing just outside the threshold, his fury scraping reality itself.

Kali met his gaze across the sigil-lit room, her pulse a slow, savage beat in her ears.

"We burn the path to peace with it."

Astraeus's growl rumbled from nowhere and everywhere, ancient as bone breaking:

"And if one must be unmade?"

Kali’s lips parted. Her heart skipped.

And for the first time in days, she felt it…

Terror.

Because if Astraeus believed him...

If Solen wasn’t here to claim her...

But to save her —

This wasn’t a story about power anymore. It was the shadow before detonation. The breath before everything unraveled.