My body suddenly remembers how tired it is. The adrenaline that kept me upright earlier is fading fast.
Varek notices immediately. “You need sleep.”
“No argument there.”
He hesitates slightly. “Do you wish to remain here,” he asks quietly, “or return to Dathanor proper?”
The answer comes easily. “To Dathanor,” I mumble. My eyelids feel heavy now. “Just… somewhere that smells of you.”
The bond flares softly with something warm and surprised. Varek doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he slides one arm carefully beneath my shoulders and the other under my knees, lifting me again.
I’m vaguely aware of voices outside the room. Of Iris saying something about broken bones and stubborn patients. Of someone else laughing quietly. But everything feels distant.
The last thing I really notice is Varek’s scent surrounding me as he carries me deeper into the rebel compound. Then there is a mattress beneath me and fabric that smells like him.
It’s warm and safe. Then the darkness of sleep finally claims me.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Pain has layers.That’s the first thing I figure out after two days stuck in this godforsaken bed.
There’s the obvious stuff—broken arm, ribs that feel like they’ve been rearranged by a sadist, bruises blooming across my torso like some kind of abstract art piece. Then there’s the deeper shit. The ache that sits under everything, dull and constant, like my body’s trying to remember what it felt like before it got dragged through hell and back.
And then there’s something new.
Something… wrong.
Or right.
I shift carefully, testing it again. The familiar protest is there—burning, immediate—but it fades faster than it should. Too fast.
My body is healing. Not just healing—accelerating.
I stare at my wrapped and braced arm. Two days ago, Iris had saidbroken. Now? Still fucked, but… less so.
“Yeah,” I mutter to myself, flexing my fingers slightly. “That’s not normal.”
No shit.
I lie back, staring up—not at the cracked ceiling of the bowling alley—but at stone.
Real stone.
Dark, uneven, veined faintly with a soft bioluminescent glow that pulses through the rock like something alive. The light isn’t harsh. It breathes. Slow. Steady. Blue-green veins are threaded through the ceiling above me, casting the whole room in a dim, shifting haze.
Dathanor.
Varek’s quarters.
His space.
Nine years is a long time to stay away from somewhere that gets under your skin. Long enough that memory smooths out the edges. Long enough that you forget just howstrangeit feels until you’re back in it.
Dathanor isn’t underground the way people expect.
Itshouldbe.
