Page 35 of Autumn L.A.W

Images slammed into her in jagged flashes. Stone corridors slick with ritual blood. Firelight. Chanting that never ended. A scream that fractured into echoes because there was nowhere left for it to go.

She cried out and dropped to one knee, palms pressed to the ground as nausea surged through her.

“You were not meant to keep me,” the prisoner went on calmly. “You are too vulnerable. Your body is too small, and your mind has too much interference.”

Lioness forced herself to stand up. “I’ll show you who’s vulnerable!” She charged at it.

Cal’s eyes flickered.

Something slammed into her awareness so violently she gasped.

Fear. Raw, panicked, unmistakably Cal’s.

Lioness!

The sound hit her inside her skull, not her ears.

She sobbed. “I hear you.”

Cal’s jaw tightened. His fingers twitched.

The prisoner frowned.

“So,” it murmured. “You still reach him.”

Lioness was shaking but remained upright. “You don’t get to keep him.”

The prisoner stepped closer. The barrier rippled but did not resist. “This unsealing was never meant to occur without flesh,” it said. “Stone has memory. Blood completes the passage.”

The obelisk flared brighter, cracks racing downward like veins.

Lioness staggered as the connection surged again. A memory surfaced, unbidden.

Cal laughing. His hand warm around hers. His voice teasing her for overthinking everything.

Hold on. Then she whispered it aloud, voice breaking. “Hold on.”

Cal’s body jerked. Just slightly. Enough to make her heart leap.

The prisoner hissed, irritation cutting through its composure. “You anchor him.”

“I love him,” Lioness said fiercely, the words ripping free before fear could stop them. “You can’t erase that.”

The prisoner stared at her for a long moment.

Then it smiled using Cal’s face.

“You mistake attachment for strength,” it said. “Emotion is not strength.”

“It can be,” Ezra said. Then he raised his voice. “You were powerfully bonded to your Pharaoh. And it sounds as if he betrayed you. Your bond was one-way only. That is why you could be imprisoned.”

The obelisk cracked with a sound like splitting bone.

The prisoner straightened fully inside Cal’s body, power settling into muscle and breath, as if it had always belonged there.

Lioness felt Cal scream inside her head, louder now, closer, desperate.

She screamed his name aloud as the world tilted, the barrier shuddered, and the unsealing of the obelisk finished its work.