It had followed her beyond the guest suite and into the corridor, where she had felt it before Sule even turned to look at her. Something had been torn open inside the compound and had not stopped bleeding, leaving loss to cling to the stone like smoke.
Then there was the baby.
His cry returned to her with startling clarity, as though the memory possessed teeth. It had been high and frantic, sharp enough to pass directly through her altered senses. She did not know whether he had cried from hunger, discomfort, or something more instinctive, but she knew the sound had followed her back into the room.
The image returned with it.
Sule had stood at the far end of the corridor, cradling his son with hands built for violence. The grief in his face had been more startling than Rhen’s fangs and more frightening than the threat in his voice when he ordered her to leave.
The word itself had struck her like a physical blow, but the devotion in his eyes had been worse.
Rhen’s blunt confirmation followed in her memory.
She died last night.
The child’s mother was gone.
Veya’s skin prickled, and she turned away from the window as though movement might dislodge the thought, but it didnot. Her sharpened senses would not allow her to forget. The compound carried mourning in every muted footstep and carefully closed door, and even the fire seemed subdued, its light too weak to reach the deeper corners of the room.
She sat again, lowering herself more slowly this time because she still did not trust the body carrying her.
The tether stirred beneath her ribs, not as pain exactly, but as an awareness of Rhen somewhere beyond the door. She could sense him moving farther through the compound while remaining impossible to escape completely.
The connection felt like a chain pulled through her bones, tight, ugly, and unavoidable.
She hated it.
She hated knowing his distance without understanding how she knew it, and she hated the way his emotions sometimes pressed against the edge of her thoughts without becoming clear enough to interpret. Most of all, she hated that no one had asked whether she wanted any of it.
Veya folded her arms across herself.
She did not know how many others lived inside the compound, though she had seen Sule and knew Rhen belonged to a brotherhood. Several males had remained close enough to guard the halls while she transitioned. She had heard different footsteps beyond the door and different voices lowered by grief, and she had caught unfamiliar scents moving through the corridor—smoke, steel, leather, and blood.
The others existed, but she did not know their names.
That ignorance was another kind of cage.
Rhen controlled what she knew, where she went, who entered, when she fed, and what happened if she failed.
Veya’s jaw tightened.
“No,” she whispered into the empty room.
Her voice broke at the edge, not with tears but beneath the sheer weight of everything bearing down upon her. She pressed one fist against her mouth and forced her breathing to slow.
Rhen had been right about one thing: her body did not need air, but her mind still needed the rhythm. It remained hers, even if the lungs performing it no longer depended upon oxygen. She drew the air in and released it slowly, choosing the familiar action for herself.
Then she lowered her hand.
If she could not run, she would learn.
If she could not leave, she would construct a map of the compound inside her mind, one corridor at a time. She would listen when they believed she could not hear and learn the brothers’ names. She would discover which of them answered to Rhen, which answered directly to Sule, and which might question an order rather than obey it blindly.
She would determine what the tether allowed Rhen to sense.
Did he feel her anger? Did he know when she lied? Would distance weaken the connection, or would it follow her wherever she went?
She would learn who regarded her as a threat, who considered her a burden, and whether anyone inside the stronghold might eventually look at her and see a person.
