The thought is not my own. It is a guttural, instinctual command from a piece of me I did not know existed. It is the roar of an addict’s craving, instantaneous and absolute.
The surge of raw power that floods my veins is unlike anything I have ever known. It is not the clean, cold energy of the Vrakken; it is wild, chaotic, pure Purna magic. It crashes against the dampening rune on my right wrist. The iron screams, glowing cherry-red. With a sound like a thunderclap, the cuff shatters, spraying molten shards across the stone floor.
The guard releases the female, his face a mask of disbelief and terror. He scrambles backward, his elven composure completely gone. He understands, on a primal level, that he hasjust uncaged something far worse than the dying creature he was tormenting. He flees, slamming the heavy door shut and ramming the bolt home, his panicked footsteps echoing down the corridor.
He has locked the source in here with me.
The silence that descends is absolute. The fire in my veins does not recede. It burns hotter, demanding fuel. My senses, amplified a thousand-fold, are focused entirely on the female. She is pressed against the far wall, her thin body trembling, her wide, terrified eyes fixed on me. The scent of her blood is no longer just a scent; it is a siren’s call, a promise of another taste of that agonizing, beautiful fire.
I am on my feet. I have no memory of the act of rising. The movement was fluid, silent, devoid of the weakness that had chained me to the floor moments before. The void inside me is gone, replaced instead by a roaring, cavernous hunger. My wounds are closing, my bones are mending, all powered by that single, stolen drop.
I look at her. The insignificant human female. The tool the elves had discarded.
She is no longer insignificant. No longer a tool.
She is the source. And I will have more.
3
ELZA
He rises from the floor not like a man, but like smoke. One moment he is a broken shape in the darkness, the next he is a standing silhouette, blocking the faint light from the corridor grate. The change is terrifying. The dying captive is gone, instead replaced by a creature of lethal, impossible grace. His movements are silent, fluid, each shift of his weight a study in predatory economy.
My back hits the cold, unyielding stone of the cell wall. My wrist strains against the iron cuff, the chain pulling taut, a cruel mockery of the distance between us. There is nowhere to run. The cell, which had been my world, is now a cage with a monster, and I am the bait.
He starts to walk toward me. It is not a charge, not a rush. It is a slow, deliberate stalk, the advance of a predator that knows its prey is cornered. His abyss-black eyes, now glowing with a faint inner light, are locked on me, and in them, I see nothing of the cold, detached creature from before. The void has been filled with a raging, chaotic inferno.
My breath seizes in my throat, a trapped, useless thing. Every instinct screams at me to flee, to fight, to dosomething. But mylimbs are frozen, locked by a terror so profound that it feels like paralysis.
He stops just out of my chain’s reach. For a long, silent moment, he just watches me, his head tilted. He is a god of death and shadow, his pale skin seeming to absorb the darkness, his silver hair a spill of moonlight. The wounds on his body are visibly closing, the skin knitting itself together with the same unnatural speed as my own. Fueled by my blood.
He moves. It is too fast to follow. A blur of motion, and he is there, kneeling before me, his presence a suffocating wave of power and heat. He takes my arm, the one the guard sliced open. His touch is not rough, but it is absolute, his long, pale fingers wrapping around my wrist with a strength that could crush bone.
He lifts my arm to his mouth, and his gaze never leaves mine as he licks the sluggishly bleeding cut.
“No…”I croak, but he doesn’t care.
Pain, sharp and clean, is the first thing I feel. But it is instantly consumed by the second.
A tidal wave of raw, psychic energy slams into me. It is not a thought. It is not an image. It is the undiluted, terrifying essence of his craving. A hunger so vast, so deep, it feels like a star collapsing. I am drowning in his need, a bottomless, desperate agony formore. My mind reels, my own thoughts scattered and lost in the roaring inferno of his. I gasp, a strangled, broken sound, my head thrown back against the stone.
He lets me go, and the psychic onslaught recedes to a deafening hum. He is stronger, his body straighter, the last of his injuries fading to nothing. His eyes are less focused now, wilder. The inferno is burning away his control.
He moves again, and this time his hand tangles in my hair, tilting my head to the side, exposing the column of my throat. My heart is a frantic drum against my ribs, a wild, panickedrhythm that fills the cell. I see the flash of his fangs, longer and sharper than before, as his mouth descends.
“St—”I gasp, unable to complete my words.
The bite is a searing agony, a twin sting of fire that steals my breath. But again, it is the mental violation that shatters me. The psychic echo is a thousand times stronger this time, a chaotic storm of sensation, of power, of a desperate, clawing need that shreds the last of his composure. I feel the ghost of his millennia of control fighting and losing, drowning in the flood of my blood’s magic. I am not just a body to him; I am a wellspring, and he is a man dying of thirst.
He drinks, and a low, guttural growl rumbles in his chest, a sound that is not human, not elven, not anything I have ever heard. It is the furious sound of a beast surrendering to its most primal nature.
He pulls away, his lips stained red, his eyes glazed with a feral light. The cold calculation is gone. The monster from the stories is here.
And his control shatters.
He pushes me back against the wall, his body covering mine. There is no lust in the act, no heat of desire. It is something far more terrifying. It is a desperate, violent attempt to consume, to conquer, to own the very source of the power that is both remaking him and driving him mad. His hands are on my clothes, tearing the thin, ragged fabric away. His mouth is on my skin, not kissing, but tasting, branding.
The psychic connection between us is no longer an echo. It is a gaping, bleeding wound, a forced connection that pours the raw, unfiltered chaos of his soul directly into mine. I feel his maddening hunger, his shame at his weakness, his desperate need to simply… end the craving by absorbing its source. It is a physical and psychic violation, an act of absolute possession thatbrands itself onto my very soul, forging a permanent, terrible link between us.
