Chapter 3 The Night the Bond Bit Back

POV: Vaelis Renn

I stood in front of the linked chambers and thought, this is a joke. This has to be a joke.

It wasn’t.

Two rooms, split down the middle by one open archway that had no door, no curtain, nothing. Just open space connecting his world to mine. On his side, everything was silver and clean and cold, a bed with sharp corners, no decorations, nothing out of place. On my side, someone had clearly given up halfway through decorating, because it was warm and messy and full of color that didn’t match anything.

The air between the two sides felt heavy already. Like standing too close to a storm before it breaks.

Torren was already inside, pulling off his outer robe like I wasn’t even there. I stepped through the archway and his eyes flicked to me for half a second before going back to what he was doing.

“There are rules,” he said.

“I didn’t ask for rules.”

“You’ll follow them anyway.” He folded the robe with sharp, precise movements. “No magic near the archway. No fire near my side. You don’t touch my things. You don’t speak to me before sunrise unless something is actively trying to kill you.”

“Wow.” I crossed my arms. “You practiced that speech.”

“I don’t need to practice things I already know.”

“Must be nice,” I said, “being that sure of yourself all the time.”

He finally looked at me properly, and there was something sharp behind his eyes, something that told me I’d hit closer than I meant to. “Careful, Renn.”

“Or what?”

He didn’t answer. He just turned away, and that made me angrier than any comeback could have. I was still glaring at his back when the windows lit up.

Both moons rose together outside the crystal glass, one silver, one deep red, and the second their light hit the room, something in my chest twisted hard, like a rope pulling tight.

Suddenly I wasn’t just angry. I was drowning in feelings that weren’t mine. Cold fury, sharp and old. Exhaustion so deep it felt like it lived in his bones. And underneath all of it, something quiet and terrible: loneliness. A kind of loneliness that had been there so long it had stopped feeling like pain and started feeling like normal.

It was Torren. I was feeling Torren.

At the same time, I felt my own magic slip its leash and rush toward him, like it wanted to answer whatever I’d just felt.

“Vaelis—” His voice cracked, actually cracked, and that scared me more than anything else that had happened all day.

The furniture in the room lifted off the ground. His side went ice-cold in a heartbeat, my side burst into sudden, unbearable heat, and the two temperatures crashed into each other right at the archway like two storms meeting.

“Stop,” I gasped, but I couldn’t. My magic was spiraling, the same way it had in the arena, feeding off panic, growing bigger every second.

Torren crossed the room in three steps and grabbed my arms. Skin to skin.

The second his hands closed around me, the magic didn’t calm down, it detonated. A blast of silver and crimson light threw us both to our knees, and I felt every wall inside me collapse at once. I wasn’t just feeling pieces of him anymore. I felt everything. His fear. His fury. Years of forcing himself to feel nothing because feeling something had cost him too much before.

He was gasping too, hands still locked around my arms like he couldn’t let go even if he wanted to.

“What is this,” he breathed, and for the first time his voice wasn’t cold. It was raw and purely human.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back.

We stayed like that, foreheads almost touching, both of us breathing hard, neither one pulling away. I looked into his eyes and saw something I never expected, real fear, sitting right behind all that control, like a crack in glass that had been holding for years.

And he looked at me like he was seeing straight through the anger I always used as armor, straight to the part of me that was just scared and alone and tired of pretending I wasn’t. For one second, neither of us was pretending anything.

Then his eyes hardened, and he shoved back from me like my skin had burned him.

“That didn’t happen,” he said, voice shaking despite how hard he was trying to steady it.

“Torren…”

“I said it didn’t happen.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but the whole chamber shuddered beneath us, hard enough to knock a cup off a shelf. A deep sound rolled through the walls, low and ancient, like something enormous was turning over far beneath the Conservatory’s floor.

Torren’s head snapped up. “What was that?”

I didn’t get the chance to answer.

The archway between our two rooms, the one with no door, the one that was never supposed to close sealed shut in an instant, a wall of living crystal growing up from the floor like it had a mind of its own. I was locked on my side. He was locked on his.

Words began to glow across the new crystal wall, half crimson, half silver, burning bright enough to hurt my eyes.

The bond has been noticed.

“Vaelis!” Torren’s voice came through the wall, muffled, sharp with something that sounded almost like panic. “Vaelis, answer me!”

I opened my mouth to shout back.

That was when the floor beneath my feet split open with a crack like thunder, and I felt the ground disappear beneath me completely.