Commanding.
Familiar.
I stop.
The stillness is abrupt, incomplete. My breathing is controlled by force rather than instinct. The rage remains, coiled and ready beneath the surface.
Shanae steps directly into my line of sight. She does not hesitate to step close. “Pax needs you.”
The words cut through everything. Not the rage but the direction of it. The bond shifts, the pain in my chest sharpening into something focused. Not absence. Not loss.
Need.
Immediate. Urgent. Alive.
Control reasserts itself, but not gently.
I straighten, forcing every visible reaction back under discipline. The destruction in the room remains. I do not acknowledge it.
“Wake them,” I say.
Shanae does not ask who.
I clarify anyway. “Aelith. Kael.” My voice is steady, back to being precise and functional.
Inside, the rage remains. It feels refined now.
Weaponised.
“We move immediately with Aelith’s plan.” But with a few minor revisions.
CHAPTER
SIX
Time dissolvesin a cell without windows.
At first, I tried to tally it.
Heartbeats. Breaths. The number of times the guards came in with water or a bowl of food that barely deserved the classification. I tried to mark the passage of hours by the rhythm of footsteps in the corridor outside, by the subtle shift in the glow of the wall lamps, by the distant echo of activity somewhere deeper in the building.
It didn’t work.
Pain interferes with time.
Exhaustion does too.
Eventually everything blurred together into a single long stretch of waiting broken only by moments of violence and the slow, grinding awareness that my arm is still broken and healing badly.
The throbbing never stops.
It settles into something dull and constant most of the time, a steady pulse under the skin that radiates from my forearm to my shoulder. Every now and then, it flares hard if I move wrong or if the rough cloth binding shifts too much. When that happens, the pain is bright enough to make my vision swim.
They haven’t asked me a single question.
Not one.
That part’s almost worse than the beatings.
