When I enter the cell, he is different.
He is still chained to the wall, his posture one of patient stillness. But the way he looks at me has changed. The cold, analytical assessment is gone, or at least, it has been pushed to the background. A raw, possessive focus is directed solely at me, a tangible heat that warms the air between us. It is the gaze of a dragon watching over its hoard. It is more terrifying than his apathy ever was.
I set the food down, my movements slow and deliberate, my senses on high alert. I feel his gaze follow my every move, a physical touch that makes my skin prickle.
I am about to leave without a word, to retreat back to the safety of my anger. But he speaks first, his voice a low rumble that vibrates through the stone floor.
“How is Lyren?”
The air leaves my lungs in a sharp, silent gasp. Not “the specimen.” Not “the anomaly.” Lyren. He used his name. The name I gave him. The shift is so monumental, so unexpected, that I am left completely unguarded. I turn and stare at him,my mouth slightly agape, my carefully constructed defenses crumbling to dust.
He studies me, and for the very first time, I see a glimmer of something other than cold logic or possessive fire in his eyes. A deep, aching conflict. A war being waged in the starless depths of his soul.
He holds my gaze. His voice, when he speaks again, is not the formal monotone of the Vrakken Enforcer. It is the guttural, possessive growl of the monster I challenged, the male I took into my body. It is a declaration. A claim.
“He is Vrakken,” he states, not as a threat, but as an undeniable, biological fact.
His eyes burn into mine, and he finishes the sentence, his claim expanding, his possession absolute.
“He is mine.”
16
EOIN
Her name is a brand on my tongue. The word—mine—hangs in the air between us, a claim so absolute it seems like a physical law newly written into the fabric of the universe. I watch her, chained and powerless, as she processes my declaration. Her mind, which I can feel through the chaotic hum of our link, is a whirlwind of disbelief, terror, and a sliver of something so buried and unwanted I cannot yet name it. Her hand, which had been resting on her dagger, has fallen to her side, forgotten. The first sign of a crack in her armor.
The change in my own internal lexicon is… jarring. For five years, the product of my weakness wasthe specimen. A scientific curiosity. A cure. It was a clean, logical designation that kept the chaotic, emotional implications at a safe distance. But seeing him, watching him with her, the designation became untenable. His name is Lyren. He is Vrakken. And he is mine. The possessive instinct is not a thought; it is a primal truth that has risen from the depths of my being to overwrite millennia of disciplined apathy.
Elza finds her breath, her voice a raw, broken whisper. “You have no right.”
“My right is written in his blood,” I state, the words cold, factual, and irrefutable. “As it is in yours.”
She flinches as if struck. The memory of our first encounter, the one that created him, hangs between us, a raw, open wound. She opens her mouth to say something else, a denial, a curse, but no words come out. She simply stares at me, her queenly composure shattered, leaving only the terrified woman who recognizes the monster in her cage has just laid an unbreakable claim on her entire world.
With a choked sound, she turns and flees, the heavy iron door slamming shut behind her, the sound of the bolt a futile attempt to lock me away from a truth she cannot escape.
The days that follow settle into a new, tense rhythm. The silent battle of wills has been replaced by a heavy, charged silence, thick with the memory of my claim. She still brings my daily provisions, but she does not meet my eyes. She sets the food down and leaves, her movements stiff, her shoulders tight with a conflict that mirrors my own. I feel it through the psychic link—a confusing maelstrom of shame, fury, and a terrifying, magnetic pull she despises herself for feeling.
I watch her go, the sway of her hips, the defiant set of her jaw. My analysis of her is no longer a simple, logical process. It is cluttered with the memory of her skin beneath my hands, the taste of her on my tongue, the sound of her crying out my name. These are chaotic, illogical observations, and yet they are now the most prominent. The Anomaly has become the center of the equation, the point around which all other calculations must now revolve.
She leaves the bowl of bland, gray stew. I have no need for sustenance in my healed state, but I eat it. It is a part of the routine, the strange, silent ritual we have established. My fingers dip into the bowl, and I feel something hard and smooth at the bottom, beneath the mush of grain.
My movements do not change. I continue to raise a portion of the stew to my mouth, my expression impassive. But my fingers close around the object. It is a small, flat stone, obsidian-black and cold to the touch, its surface polished to a mirror sheen. A Vrakken spy stone.
The Matriarch.
Her reach extends even here, into this fortress of runaways at the very edge of the known world. One of Elza’s people is a traitor. Or perhaps the stone was simply planted by a spy who has already come and gone. It does not matter. The message is here.
I close my fist around the stone, and the psychic connection establishes itself instantly. Matriarch Brinda’s mental voice is not a voice at all. It is a presence, an intrusion of cold, sharp-edged thoughts that feel like shards of ice sliding into my mind.
Enforcer. Your delay is noted.
The thought is imperious, accusatory. It has been twelve days since my arrival. The extraction should have been completed within the hour.
You have sent no reports. My other assets, however, have been more forthcoming. They report a… change in your disposition. An unacceptable sentimentality.
My jaw tightens. I think of the boy’s drawing. I think of the way I watched Elza sleep after she collapsed in my arms. I think of the words that just left my mouth, claiming them both. I have been observed. My weakness has been catalogued.
