Chapter 3 Echo Heart

The first thing I noticed when consciousness staggered back was the taste of ash.

It coated my tongue, clung to the roof of my mouth, settled gritty at the back of my throat. The second thing was pain—a deep, bruised ache radiating from my ribs, like something massive had stepped on my chest.

The third thing was that my heart wasn’t beating alone.

I lay still, eyes closed, listening.

Thump. …Thump. Thump. Thump.

Two rhythms. Not perfectly aligned—one just a fraction behind the other, like an echo trying to catch up. When I tried to breathe deeper, both faltered at the same time.

Fear is a cold thing, usually. This wasn’t. This was hot, electric, crawling under my skin.

I forced my eyes open.

The sky above me was a patchwork of smoke and bruised dawn, streaks of dirty orange leaking through the clouds. The flares were gone; only their ghosts remained. The floodlights we’d set up along the ridge flickered weakly, some shattered, some melted, some still trying to pretend everything was fine.

Nothing was fine.

I pushed my palm against the rock, intending to sit up, and jerked to a halt as something yanked my arm back hard enough to drag my shoulder in its socket.

“What the—”

I turned my head.

That was when I saw the chain.

It wasn’t metal. Metal didn’t glow. Metal didn’t hum under your skin.

From the inside of my wrist, where the spell mark burned like a fresh brand, a thin band of reddish-gold light extended outward, hovering a few inches above the ground before arcing toward—

Oh.

Him.

Drake Varyn sat slumped against a slab of broken stone a short distance away, the other end of the light-chain wrapped around his wrist. It clung to him like a cuff, runes crawling along the surface in a lazy, molten spiral. Every time he breathed, the sigils brightened, then dimmed.

He was half-shifted and half-not, frozen between the forms like the world couldn’t decide which version of him it hated more. Human skin mottled with patches of faint scale along his ribs and shoulders. His wings were gone, leaving only phantom heat shimmering behind him. Horns receded, leaving dark curls damp with sweat and soot.

He looked… wrong. Wrong because he was here, on the ground, not miles up in the sky raining fire. Wrong because dragons weren’t supposed to fit inside human bodies and yet here he was, massive frame folded into something almost ordinary.

Almost.

His eyes were closed, lashes dark against smoke-streaked skin. His chest rose and fell steadily, stubbornly. Each breath tugged at my wrist.

My heart gave a hard, disbelieving kick.

The echo answered in his chest. I felt it. Like someone had reached inside me, grabbed my pulse, and tied it to his with a knot that wouldn’t come loose.

No.

I swallowed down rising panic, ignored the pain in my ribs, and dragged myself upright. The world blurred, sharpened, then blurred again. My head rang like someone had pitched me into a bell tower and used me for practice.

The battlefield around us looked scraped raw.

The barricades where Rourke’s line had stood were twisted heaps of metal and char. Trucks skewed at odd angles, windshields melted, tires puddled into black lumps.

Bodies lay scattered like discarded dolls, some in Syndicate uniforms, some reduced to shapes I refused to name.

My spell circle—my perfect, approved, triple-checked circle—was nothing but a black scar on the rock, the runes burned deeper into stone where they’d exploded inward. The earth around us was cracked in a rough, shallow crater where dragon and witch had collided.

The flares had stopped. The radios were silent. The world felt hollow.

“Saints,” I whispered. “What did we do?”

My voice rasped like broken glass. It was enough to stir him.

Drake’s fingers twitched, muscles in his forearm flexing beneath soot. The chain between us gave a low, warning hum. A moment later his eyes opened.

Everything in me went very still.

In human form, his eyes weren’t supposed to look like that. I’d seen sketches in training—grainy surveillance shots, panicked drawings from survivors, careful diagrams in Syndicate reports—but none of them captured it.

They weren’t just gold. They were molten. Light pooled around the pupils like liquid metal, ringed with an outer band of faint, flickering red. When he focused them fully on me, it felt like being pinned to the ground by a spotlight.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.

Then, slowly, he lifted his bound wrist and squinted at the glow.

“Ah,” he said, voice rough with smoke and exhaustion. “That explains the headache.”

His gaze traveled along the band of light to where it wrapped around my wrist. I resisted the urge to hide it behind my back.

“You,” he said.

The word wasn’t a question. It hit my chest like a mark.

“Drake Varyn,” I managed, because procedure was safer than panic. “By order of the Syndicate High Council, you are under arrest. You will be transported to—”

The chain pulsed.

Pain spiked straight through my ribs, sharp enough to snatch the breath from my lungs. Drake flinched at the same time, hand flying to his chest.

We both froze. His fingers splayed where mine wanted to. The ache in my sternum matched the tension in his jaw.

“Oh, that’s unfortunate,” he murmured.

I ground my teeth. “What did you do?”

His brows rose lazily. “You’re the one who drew the circle, witch.”

“My name,” I snapped, more from fear than anger, “is Christine Knight.”

“Christine,” he repeated, tasting it, the syllables curling out slow and smoky. “Fitting.”

“For what?” I demanded.

His gaze flicked from my face to my wrist and back. “For someone who thought she was binding a dragon and ended up chaining herself instead.”

I looked down.

Up close, the mark on my wrist looked worse.

The skin was unbroken, but it might as well have been carved into bone. A circle of tiny interlocking runes formed a ring just above the pulse-point, each sigil hooked to the next, none of them in the exact position they’d been in the manuals.

At the center of the ring, a flame sigil burned faintly. Every time my heart beat, it flared. Every time Drake’s heart beat, it pushed back.

I swallowed bile.

“This is a binding,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Soul-level. Experimental, but—”

“But it wasn’t meant to take two souls and braid them together,” he finished. “You tried to force a cage around a dragon. You didn’t give the magic enough room to decide who it belonged to.”

He tilted his head, watching me with unnerving interest. “So it chose both.”

“Magic doesn’t choose,” I snapped.

“Everything chooses,” he said quietly. “Fire most of all.”

I refused to let that sink in. “Fine. Then we un-choose it. We sever the link.”

Drake’s mouth curved in a humorless half-smile. “You can’t sever a soul chain, Christine. You can only break it.”

“Same thing.”

“No.” His gaze sharpened, all traces of amusement gone. “Breaking a chain like this breaks one of its anchors. You want to be free? One of us dies.”