“We’re stronger together,” Ashley murmurs. Half asleep.
Her shadows curled around both of us with the possessive tenderness of darkness that has chosen its people and intends to keep them.
“Yes,” I say. “We are.”
The dome holds. The scouts report silence. The forest breathes.
And for one night, the three of us exist not as prey and protectors and conspirators against a system that wants to destroy us, but as the thing we actually are: three people in love, lying in the dark together, stronger than anything that isn’t this.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ashley
The bindingcracks at three in the morning.
Not dramatically — not the explosive failure that I’ve been bracing for since the ritual in the grove.
A slow, quiet fracture, like ice splitting on a pond when the temperature shifts just enough to change the physics.
I’m lying in my dormitory bed with my roommate sleeping six feet away and the detection grid pulsing its faint blue through the corridor outside my door, and I feel the crack travel through the binding’s deepest layer — the one that touches the root of my power — with the specific, intimate sensation of something that was held together by force finally exceeding the force’s capacity to hold it.
My shadows surge.
Not outward. The binding still contains the expansion — the outer layers intact, the blood-and-fire walls holding.
But the root layer, the deepest compression that Bael’s ritual pushed my living darkness into, gives way.
The shadows at my core — the intelligence, the independence, the crimson-bright heart of the Ascendant power that the binding was designed to bury — shifts from compressed to restrained.
Still contained.
But no longer crushed.
The difference between a door that’s locked and a door that someone is pushing against from the other side.
I lie in the dark and feel my power testing the remaining layers and I know with the cold certainty of a woman who has been monitoring her own shadows for months that the binding will fail completely within days.
Maybe sooner.
The crimson is fighting — the harbinger color pushing through the blood-and-fire walls the way dawn pushes through the night, the natural progression of a power that was always going to mature past the point where any binding could contain it.
I get dressed. Take the blood path.
The forest grove at three thirty in the morning, the dome waiting, Bael’s shadows recognizing my approach and parting the entrance the way a door opens for someone who lives there.
Bael is awake.
Bael is always awake — the ancient vampire who doesn’t sleep so much as settle into a state of reduced awareness that he can exit in a fraction of a second if the scouts report a threat.
He looks at me and knows immediately.
“The root layer,” he says.
“Cracked. Not failed. But cracking.”
“How long?”
“Days. Maybe less.”
