POV: Rena Vale
Air detonates—hard, searing, wrong—and my body rips off the ground.
“Rena!” Kai explodes forward, arms locking around my waist mid-air. Heat slams into his back like a collapsing star. His breath grunts out; his body takes the full burn; my shield flickers too late. We smash into stone together.
“Kai—” The word breaks. He rolls me under, as if he can still be a wall, then goes boneless on top of me.
Silence where there should be sound.
I shove, twist, get him onto his side. His head lolls. Eyes closed. Lips pale. Chest moving in a jagged, wrong rhythm like a drum someone split down the middle.
“Kai! Hey—Kai, look at me.” I slap his cheek with shaking fingers. “Open your eyes.”
Auren drops beside us, hands already at Kai’s throat, counting under his breath. “Pulse… faint. Breathing’s off.” His gaze snaps to mine, wide and wild. “He’s not breathing right.”
Panic swallows logic. “Do something!”
“I am,” he snaps, voice cracking. He tilts Kai’s head back, ear to his mouth, hand over sternum. “Come on, Alpha… come on…”
“Kai, please.” I push my palm to his chest, feel the struggling beat. He took the blast for me. He took everything for me. “Don’t do this. Don’t you dare do this.”
A ragged gasp shudders through him—half inhale, half pain. Not enough. His pulse flutters thin as spider silk under Auren’s fingers.
Rage and terror detonate inside me at the same time. Light bleeds up through my skin, bright enough to stain the hallway silver. I turn to the cell, to the door, to the runes that just laid him down like a weapon they finally broke.
“You picked the wrong girl,” I whisper, and my voice isn’t a voice—it’s a blade.
I slam both hands on the door.
Stone screams. Wards pop like blistered paint. Iron shatters, hinges leap, a ring of silver fire roars outward and dies, and the door becomes wreckage at my feet.
“Dad!” I lunge into the cell, catching the frail man before he topples out. He folds into me like a collapse that’s practiced itself for years. He’s all bones and cold and blood that won’t stop leaking from an old split along his hairline.
“Rena,” he breathes, disbelieving, fingers scrabbling for my face like he’s trying to prove I’m not a ghost. “Little star—”
“I’m here.” My voice tunnels itself into steadiness because he needs that lie to be true. I cradle his head, press my cheek to his temple, taste salt and iron and something like home under ruin. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”
His hand trembles over my jaw. “Don’t—don’t touch the—”
“It’s gone,” I say, dragging him clear of the threshold, kicking the last hot fragments away with my heel. “Door’s gone. We’re leaving. Right now.”
Behind me, Auren is a prayer said with clenched teeth. “Breathe, Kai. Don’t die on her. Please don’t die on her.” He presses again. “That’s it. Again. Come on.”
A low, shredded sound tears out of Kai’s chest. He coughs once, chest seizing, lungs finding the world by force. He doesn’t wake. He breathes, barely—each draw a broken saw across stone.
“Tell me he’s okay,” I whisper to no one and everyone.
“Not okay,” Auren grits, not sugarcoating death. “Alive.”
Light still crawls under my skin, seeking something to burn. I want to pour it into Kai; I want to pour it into every rune in this place and hear them scream; I want to pour it into the Council’s throat and make them choke on it. But my father’s weight in my arms is a clock, and every second is a thief.
“We move,” I say, hitching Dad higher, ignoring the way my arms shake. “Auren, can you carry—”
“I’ve got him,” Auren says, already sliding an arm under Kai’s shoulders, the other under knees, lifting with a grunt and a curse. Kai’s head drops against his chest; Auren adjusts, jaw tight. “He’s heavier than his temper.”
“Careful with him.”
“Like glass,” he mutters, then adds, softer, “I know.”
“Okay.” I suck in cold air that tastes like mold and tunnels and old screams. Lyria paces in my ribs, growl low, urging forward, forward, forward.
“Dad, can you walk?” I whisper, checking his legs, his feet, the cuff still biting his wrist. Fury spikes fresh. I rip the cuff off like it’s paper and toss it into the dark.
“Try,” he rasps, trying to rise and failing so hard it hurts to see. “Not… strong.”
“I have you.” I haul his arm over my shoulder. His knees buckle; I lock mine. “Lean.”
He does. He’s weight and will and a thousand stories I’m not ready to hear.
“Back the way we came,” Auren says, breath already laboring with Kai’s deadweight. “Stairs. Then left through the hollow wall. Fast.”
“Slow enough to see traps,” I shoot back, light dimming, then flaring again as I say it.
He nods once. “Eyes up. If a rune twitches, you do not touch it.”
We move.
Every sound doubles with someone else’s pain. Chains knock in other cells. Wolves lift their heads as we pass and put them down again because hope is a luxury this hallway didn’t budget for. My father’s breath rasps against my neck, feather-light, shallow, trying to be quiet because he’s learned that lesson hard.
“It’s you,” he murmurs, voice catching on the beginning of a laugh that can’t afford to exist. “I knew—I kept… I kept a story in my mouth so I wouldn’t forget your face.”
The words punch tears out of me I don’t have time to wipe away. “Don’t talk,” I whisper. “Save it for after.”
“After,” he repeats, like that word belongs here, like we have the right to say it.
Auren staggers, catches himself, adjusts his grip on Kai. “Stay with me, Alpha,” he mutters, forehead pressed briefly to Kai’s as if he can share breath. “Don’t make me say nice things about you to get you back.”
Kai doesn’t answer. He breathes again, a thin scrape of sound that makes me want to scream at the walls and kiss his mouth in the same second.
We round the first corner. Darkness crowds close. My light rebounds off stone in soft pulses. The ruined lock glitters sharp behind us like ice. Ahead: the narrow stair yawning up into thinner air.
“Almost there,” I tell my father, lying again. “Halfway.”
He squeezes my fingers. “Your mother would—” He breaks, shakes his head, starts again. “She would tell me to stand taller. I’ll try.”
Pain floods my chest. “You already are.”
We reach the base of the stair. Auren hitches Kai higher with a hiss. “I can make it,” he says, because he will or die doing it. “You go first. Light the steps.”
“Okay.” I aim glow at the risers, step up, pull Dad with me, one breath, one bone, one promise at a time. “Left foot. Good. Right. Good. Don’t let go.”
“Never,” he says, and if I could frame a word, that would be the one.
Half the flight is behind us when a new sound threads the hallway—soft, greedy, close. Not runes. Not chains.
A whisper of leather on stone.
I stop. Lyria lifts her head and bares her teeth. Cold walks fingers up my spine. “Auren.”
He freezes, weight rocking under Kai, eyes cutting to the top of the stair. “I hear it.”
“Back,” I breathe, trying to pivot, trying to shield my father with my body, trying to widen my light without blowing the ceiling—
A voice pours down the steps like oil. “Touching rescue,” it purrs. “Truly moving.”
Verdan.
I turn, dragging my father behind me, light surging violent and bright. At the top of the stair, white robes catch my glow, silver thread gleams, a smile grows that thinks it invented pain.
“Get behind me,” Auren snarls, shifting as far as he can with Kai in his arms.
“I am behind you,” I say, because my father is behind me and that’s the only geometry that matters.
“Such bravery,” the Chancellor croons, descending one step, then another, casual as prayer. “Shame it always ends the same.”
“Take one more step,” I say, voice low and shaking with the weight of everything I’m holding, “and I will burn this place down with you inside it.”
He laughs. “By all means—set a fire in an underground tunnel. Your tactical genius is blinding.”
“Move,” Auren snaps. “Now.”
Three things happen at once.
A draft steals across my neck from behind—wrong, cold, intimate.
A flicker of rune-light betrays a quickstep, sideways, not down.
A hand I don’t consent to touches the crown of my head like I’m a child to be patted.
I whirl—too slow.
Cold steel slides against the side of my throat, intimate as a kiss. Verdan stands so close I can smell mint and blood and the kind of magic that rots. His free arm snakes around my shoulders, pinning my arms just enough that I can’t break free without cutting myself on his blade.
“Hello, Luminous,” he whispers against my ear, breath soft, delighting in every flinch he extracts. “Let’s not be foolish.”
“Kai!” Auren chokes, terror detonating in the narrow hall.
My father tries to surge forward; his knees give; he falls against my back with a broken sound. I lock my legs, keep him upright, keep my light from blowing us all to ash, keep my voice from breaking on the plea I want to hurl at the dark.
“Let him go,” I say, each word a tremor held together by fury.
The Chancellor smiles so close the curve of it scratches my cheek. Blade kisses skin. “Oh, Rena,” he murmurs, pleased at my shaking. “I believe you’re the one I’m holding.”