Chapter 2 When the Spell Breaks

For a heartbeat, all I saw was motion.

Shadow and molten gold. Wings half-furled. Scales catching the floodlights in jagged flares of copper and crimson. He was enormous even crouched low, claws biting into stone, tail lashing.

Heat rolled off him in waves. Not warmth—furnace heat. Forge-heat. The kind that softened metal and turned bone brittle.

“Hold!” Rourke bellowed. “Hold your—”

A rifle cracked.

The sound split the night open. The bullet sparked harmlessly off a scale, and the dragon’s head snapped toward the line, eyes flaring like twin suns.

He roared.

This time it wasn’t distant. It tore through the air and through my chest, ancient and incandescent with rage.

Then the fire came.

The heat hit like a living thing.

Not a wave, not a wall—more like a hand, vast and furious, slamming into the world and daring it to break. The air screamed as it bent. Stone popped and fractured. Somewhere to my left, a shield rune failed with a sound like glass shattering underwater.

Men scattered. Someone fell, armor clanging as they hit the ground. Another screamed—a short, cut-off sound that vanished into the roar of flame.

I stayed where I was.

The circle flared brighter beneath my boots, lines burning through chalk and bone and into the rock itself. Power surged up through my legs, sharp enough to steal my breath. My teeth rattled as the sigils drank in the fire, greedily converting destruction into fuel.

This was what they’d trained me for.

Contain the blast. Redirect the force. Turn the monster’s strength into a leash.

My hands shook anyway.

I clenched them into fists and forced myself to breathe through the heat, through the pressure building behind my eyes. The world narrowed until there was nothing but flame, rune-light, and the dragon’s silhouette moving through both like a god walking unafraid through prayer.

Fear tried to rise.

I crushed it.

Fear was a luxury for people who weren’t standing at the center of a spell meant to break legends.

White-gold flame washed over barricades and trucks, over men scrambling for cover. Shields flared blue where wards caught the heat. Some held.

Some didn’t.

The fire slammed into the invisible wall of my circle, and my sigils drank it in, turning destruction into fuel. The runes at my feet pulsed, chalk-white lines burning to angry red.

“Now, Knight!” Rourke shouted, his voice sharp with panic.

I lifted my hands.

Power surged up my spine and poured into the circle. The runes twisted, joined, reached outward like grasping roots.

“By ash and bone,” I intoned, voice rough with heat. “By oath and chain. By blood freely spilled and flame freely given—”

The dragon swept fire across our ranks again, but his gaze snapped to me. To the circle. To the glow beneath my feet.

He recognized the trap.

His wings snapped open, shockwaves rippling through the air. He lunged—not away, but toward me.

Of course he did. Dragons didn’t flee spells. They broke them.

“Christine!” Rourke shouted. “Finish it!”

“I’m trying,” I gritted out.

The binding lines lashed outward, red threads striking his claws, his chest, the underside of his throat—

The world hiccupped.

For a fraction of a second, I saw him clearly. Not a monster. Something fierce and alive. Scars along his muzzle. A notch missing from one horn. Dark blood seeping from a wound we hadn’t given him.

The clarity hurt more than the fire.

Because once I saw him, I couldn’t unsee him—not as a beast shaped like a storybook nightmare, but as something forged by time and violence and survival. Old scars crossed his hide in jagged lines, each one a memory burned into flesh. The missing notch in his horn wasn’t damage; it was history.

He wasn’t rampaging.

He was wounded. Cornered. Furious because there was nowhere left to go.

The realization struck too late to matter.

The binding pulled harder, my magic straining as it tried to force his will into a shape it understood. The runes screamed, lines stuttering and reforming, the spell resisting itself.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Spells didn’t hesitate.

My breath hitched. Sweat ran down my spine despite the heat. Somewhere behind me, Rourke shouted something I couldn’t hear over the rising whine of power tearing at its own seams.

I tried to adjust—just a fraction, just enough to reinforce the failing lines—but the magic was already ahead of me, surging toward a conclusion it had chosen.

A wrong one.

The ground lurched.

The circle buckled inward.

And suddenly I wasn’t shaping the spell at all.

I was being dragged into it.

Then his fire met my binding at the same heartbeat.

He barreled into the circle. Claws smeared sigils with blood and flame. Runes twisted into patterns I didn’t recognize.

“Wait—” I tried to pull the spell back.

Too late.

The magic snapped.

It didn’t wrap around him. It folded inward, collapsing like a dying star.

Something tore.

A hot hook sank into my chest, deep enough to steal my breath. Another buried itself somewhere beyond my skin—another presence, another heartbeat.

White fire swallowed the world.

I didn’t hear my scream. I didn’t feel the ground when it broke beneath us.

There was only burning. Inside my blood. Inside my bones.

Mine—not mine.

Two heartbeats stumbled together.

Then darkness closed in.

I woke to silence.

Smoke smeared the sky. Dying flares guttered overhead. My lungs burned with every breath.

I tried to move. Pain answered.

And then—a snarl.

Not in the air.

Inside.

I froze.

My heart hammered—and an echo answered, out of sync but undeniable.

“What did I do?” I whispered.

The ground around me was cracked, my circle scorched away. Barricades lay twisted in the distance.

Closer—far too close—lay a man.

Bare-chested. Soot-streaked. Scarred. One wing half-shifted into shadow and golden scale before fading back into flesh. Red lines of my magic bound his wrists and throat, pulsing weakly.

His eyes opened.

Molten gold locked onto mine.

“You,” he rasped.

“Drake Varyn,” I said, because naming him made him smaller. “By order of the Syndicate—”

Pain stabbed through my chest.

He flinched.

We both stilled.

I lifted my arm. A symbol glowed on my wrist—broken circle, spiraled runes, a tiny flame.

The same mark burned on his skin.

Understanding dawned in his eyes.

“You tried to chain me,” he said softly. “But you bound yourself instead.”

He laughed, rough and breathless.

“Congratulations, witch. You just tied your life to a dragon.”

Our heartbeats answered each other.

And I couldn’t tell where mine ended anymore.