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Prologue
Then…
SLADE
Hands chained and bound, I stare through the cage bars. It’s quiet today. It’s been quiet all week, in fact. Quieter than usual.
Something is happening.
Closing my eyes, I let my head fall against the stone wall behind me, and I see her. Her blonde hair getting tucked behind her ear as she smiles over at someone who is too blurry to make out. She must be farther away today.
But I see her.
That’s all that matters.
I’ve seen this image before. Many times. Her smile keeps me from losing my mind, because I want to see it at least once myself.
Not that I’ll claim her.
I just want to see her with my own eyes.
See if she’s as perfect as she’s been in my head all these long years.
The ground vibrates under me just enough to cause me to open my eyes and look around. Numerous pairs of eyes meet mine, everyone looking to me like they’re asking me to answer what that feeling of power is.
Then the ground rumbles, and every cell seems to shift.
Jerking at the chains, I force myself to my feet, feeling my arms stretched to their limit as everyone else follows my action. As everyone finishes standing to their feet, I listen, hearing something happening far above.
“There’s a fight going on,” someone whispers.
Hope becomes a stench in the room. Haven’t they learned better than to feel hope by now?
Don’t they know how stupidly dangerous such an emotion is?
Before I can remind them, I hear a loud crack seconds before wind rushes through the cells with such explosive power that it almost blows me off my feet. Numerous others are knocked down or thrown into walls.
The volatile wind disappears as quickly as it came, and my eyes take in the dull, lifeless cage bars that suddenly look like iron instead of spelled confines. Daring to hope just a little, I glance down at my chains.
I’m one of the few who is chained inside the cell, because the cell alone wouldn’t hold me.
With one harsh jerk, the chain on my wrist groans, and a smirk lights up one side of my mouth. My eyes dart around, seeing all the timid, confused prisoners studying their own bars, waiting for a trap.
It’s always a trap.
But I know for a fucking fact they wouldn’t risk freeing me.
Taking a deep breath, I rip both my arms forward. Stone crumbles around the base of the chains for the first time ever, and the chains rip free, taking plugs of the stone with them at the end.
Eyes widen all around me as I stand to my full height, feeling the power flowing through me like it hasn’t done in far too long. It’s almost drugging to feel it all surge forth with one blast.
Even in my weakened state, I feel like I could destroy the world right now. And I’m ready to. Ready to burn this place to fucking hell, along with everyone who has kept me in here.
Feeling the silver burn through my eyes, taking over with a need to be free so fierce that I almost succumb to instinct alone, I barely keep control. My hands turn to fists just as I walk over, almost feeling clumsy with the ability to take a step, and punch the cage door.
It flies off and crashes into the next cage, mangling it. It’s silent aside from the sound of my chains dragging as I walk in front of Kya’s door.
She scrambles to uncover my secret journal from a loose stone in her floor that she always sits on to hide. I arch and eyebrow as she smirks, and I rip her door open with one hand. It flies off the hinges as well, slamming into the cage across from hers and clambering down to the ground.
As if it sets off a tidal wave, the sound of cages exploding all around composes a song of violent, bloodthirsty freedom.
People start vanishing from all around, the ability to dematerialize finally restored.
It almost feels like a high when I let my own body move through the fabric of the air around me, rematerializing high in a tree outside of the compound.
Despite the yelling I hear and the hundreds of people below, I close my eyes, smelling the air around me. It doesn’t smell like home, and this isn’t even the right plane, but it’s sure as hell the closest I’ve ever been.
But as always, when I close my eyes, I see her. The girl who haunts me. The girl I want to hate for being so untouchable.
It’s a scene I’ve seen so many times before the visions of her start back over on her eighteenth birthday, and I have to relive those short years over and over, wondering if she dies directly after turning into this hawk, since it’s the last I ever see of her.
But she never feels gone. Always feels—
A ripple of awareness slices through me, bringing every nerve on my body to attention, and my eyes dart open, immediately landing on the very bloody familiar hawk that soars into the sky.
Someone shouts, and I stand in the tree, looking on with some twisting sensation in the pit of my gut. The hawk hammers an invisible force, and I feel the power shatter all around me.
As a battle explodes to life, my eyes land on the naked form of a woman who is falling. Blonde hair waves in the wind, cloaking a face I’m almost terrified to see.
When she crashes limply to the ground, something inside me—something dark, primal, and instinctively furious—stirs to life.
Without intentionally doing so, I’m suddenly at her side as I stare on at her for a split second that feels like an eternity.
My chest pounds like my heart is beating for the first time in centuries, and I suck in a breath that betrays me by forcing me to inhale her scent for the first time while there are still shackles on my wrists.
Her eyes are closed, and her breathing is shallow, but whatever power she just used has drained her.
But I know without a doubt it’s her. I’ve studied every feature of her with my eyes closed. Now, however, my eyes rake over her bare, very real body with my eyes wide open.
A growl rumbles out of me when I see a small trickle of blood from her nose, and in the next instant, I’m lifting her, cradling her to me as all the life in me begs to claim her.
Take her.
Mark her.
Own her.
