Page 36 of Marked By the Enemy
The tether curled tight around my ribs—not in panic. In warning.
Darian let go of my hand. “Next time, we pace it.”
“Next time, we ask it what it wants.”
He remained tense and rooted to the spot. “And if it answers?”
“Then we listen.” I turned back to the threads we’d left hanging in the air.
They hadn’t disappeared yet. They were fading. They had flexed. They had held. They had changed shape and learned how to return. They weren’t only responding anymore. They were remembering. And so was I.
The tether lifted again without command. It didn’t surge. It offered. A new thread curled from my palm and drew a shape in the air. I let it show me what it had. The field appeared again, wider this time. Two graves. One newer, one already worn. My hands were raw. My sleeves soaked to the elbows. It had rained that night. I remembered the smell of wet soil and old blood.
Mom’s face had been still. Too still. And beside her, Ryn—his cloak still damp, his collar still marked from where they’d tried to drag him away before the blow landed.
Fae. He’d never told anyone else. He had only told me. And I hadn’t saved him. That trust was the last thing he gave.
I had buried them side by side—the grave too small, the dirt too stubborn. I remembered my voice breaking when I said both their names out loud, once each, and then never again.
The bond asked if I wanted to keep it. To anchor this. To let the memory shape the tether.
I stood still, core cold, tears burning my eyes, staring at the flicker of it in the air—my knees in the mud, my hands bleeding, my mouth open in a scream lost to the trees. And I said no. I pulled the memory back. I wasn’t ready to let the bond carry it.
Chapter eleven
Prince Darian
We agreed to separate after lunch because we wanted to test what the bond would do. Darian took the east path into the woods. I stayed at the Keep. We didn’t speak before parting, only nodded. The space between us offered only ease. The tether stretched like a thread adrift in water.
The heat thickened as the sun peaked. I sat on the scorched edge of the training ring wall, boots planted against the stone, arms braced behind me. The dirt shimmered under the light. A few insects hovered, dazed in the heat, a low buzz of the world slowing under the sun’s weight. Five minutes. Ten.
The tether stayed quiet but tense, drawn thin like silk on the verge of snapping. I shifted on my behind and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Sweat clung beneath my shirt. My mouth tasted of salt and dust. Tension snapped through my ribs, like something waking.
I pounced off the wall and stood. “Darian?”
No reply. But the heat pulsed around me, denser now, like the bond had inhaled. I closed my eyes and focused past the sun, past the sweat, until the edge of it found me. His breath came fast and unsteady. The crunch of dry bark and thorns. A curse—low and tight, close to the ground.
The bond lit behind my sternum, and the image followed: a clearing burned to ash, light warped around stone, tree trunks carved deep with four circles—one left unfinished.
A whisper rose behind it. “You open doors you don’t understand.”
The tether yanked tight.
“Darian!” I called, already moving.
His voice cracked through. “I found something… No, it found me.”
“Where are you?”
“Two ridges east. Past the dead pines.”
I ran through the meadow and toward the woods. The midday sun blazed through the canopy. It burned against my shoulders and neck, and I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand as I pushed forward. I didn’t slow, didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate; nothing mattered except what waited. Dust kicked up with every step.
The tether pulled me forward sharply, dragging me relentlessly past brush and overgrowth. Thorns tore at my legs, cutting small red lines into my skin as I pushed through without slowing. Darian.
When I joined him, he stood at the center of a scorched clearing. Blackened ground, dry as bone, surrounded him. His breath came in short gasps. His hands clenched at his sides. The bond shimmered along his spine.
I stepped into the clearing. Darian’s shoulders remained squared, but his eyes tracked me. The silver shimmer wasn’t only a fae flicker. It looked embedded, like something had drifted inside and touched the bond directly—past thought, past blood. I stopped a few paces away, letting the heat settle between us.
