Darkness poured through him like molten tar.Kael screamed, but the sound barely belonged to him anymore. The chains didn’t just bind his body now—they had invaded deeper, threading through muscle, marrow, thought. Every link pulsed with Aurex’s rhythm, as if his veins had been rewoven into iron.His chest heaved in agony, but worse than pain was the feeling of slipping.Like sand pouring through open fingers.Like drowning in black water while a hand forced him down.Mine, Aurex’s voice thundered through the chamber of his mind. Your body, your strength, your heart. All of it, mine.Kael clung desperately to what was left. He forced himself to remember Lina’s face—the light in her eyes, the way her voice cracked when she whispered his name. For one agonizing instant, it steadied him. His breath caught, a flicker of himself rising against the tide.But Aurex saw it too.And struck.The darkness shifted, coalesced into images—memories stolen from Kael’s own soul. He saw Lina, but twist

The storm had thinned.What had threatened to collapse the world around them moments before now ebbed into uneasy silence. The walls of the chamber still hummed with aftershock, faint threads of resonance shimmering and dissolving like mist after a thunderclap. Kael drew in a shallow breath, his chest burning with the weight of what he hadn’t said—what he could no longer keep hidden.Lina’s eyes were fixed on him, wide, searching, expectant. She was too still, as if any sudden movement might cause the fragile calm between them to shatter into violence again.Kael’s pulse thundered. His mind screamed for delay, for excuses, for anything but this truth. But he saw the trust in her gaze fraying already, strands unravelling because she sensed he was holding something back. He couldn’t let it unravel further.Not now. Not with so little time left.He forced his voice steady.“Lina… there’s something you need to know.”Her breath caught. She didn’t speak, only nodded for him to go on.Kael’

The silence was almost unbearable.After so much running, fighting, resisting, surviving, the sudden stillness pressed against Lina’s chest in a way that felt heavier than any battle. It was not the silence of safety, but of suspension—like a taut string holding just before it snapped.She sat curled at the edge of the narrow cot, her knees drawn up, the faint hum of Kael’s shielding device purring through the floor beneath them. The air tasted faintly metallic, laced with the aftershock of energy he had burned hours ago when the storm had passed without consuming them.Kael was across the room, half-illuminated by the sterile light of the console he had managed to salvage. His shoulders were hunched, his hands trembling over a series of half-compiled strings, the glow flickering across his jaw. His hair fell into his face, damp with sweat though the air was cold.Lina wanted to speak, but she couldn’t yet. Words were fragile things, and the last confession he’d poured out had left th

The console’s flare snapped the room into hard light, and Kael was already moving—shoulders squared, hands cutting across the interface in tight, precise strokes. The glow wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t random. It had the feel of a gloved hand slipping into a heartbeat and pretending to be the pulse.“Don’t move,” he said, eyes locked to the streaming code.Lina didn’t. The pulse of the intrusion still thrummed in her nerves, as if it had bled straight through the machine and brushed her veins. It felt personal. It felt like being read.“Kael,” she whispered, “what is that?”“An intrusion sequence.” His voice was clipped, breath held between keystrokes. Lines of red and white script cascaded and shattered, reforming with mocking ease. “Sophisticated. Whoever sent it knows our footprint.”“My footprint,” she said.The console answered for him with a bright, cruel ping.Kael slammed a net around the sequence. It split, multiplied, wriggled through the mesh like mercury. He drove a second quar

“Stay with me—”But her body refused.Kael’s hands hovered uselessly over her shoulders, his pulse roaring in his ears. For one endless heartbeat, Lina Ward became nothing at all. No breath. No flicker behind her closed lids. No trace of the girl who had defied Syndicate machines, storms, and inevitability. Just silence.“No,” he whispered, the word scraping raw against his throat. “No, no, no—”He gathered her against him, desperate, shaking her lightly as though he could coax her consciousness back. Her hair fell across his arm, strands brushing his wrist like threads already unraveling. Panic lanced through him—the vision he had dreaded for months was here, not nineteen, not later. Now.Not yet. Not like this.Kael pressed his forehead against hers, closing his eyes against the terror clawing up his chest. “You don’t get to leave me, Lina. Not when I’ve come this far. Not when I’m this close.” His voice cracked, splintered. “Fight it. Please—fight.”The console’s glow shifted, its