POV: Soraya
The words echo inside my skull long after the silence returns.
You’re not cursed. You’re leverage.
I stand frozen with my back against the cold stone, breath shallow. The dungeon is quiet again—just dripping water somewhere, the low crackle of a dying torch, the soft rasp of chains shifting when Kaelen moves.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the shock, the grief, my mother’s blood still sticky under my nails—maybe it all snapped something in my mind and now I’m hearing voices.
My wolf huffs, unimpressed. Not voice, she insists. Him.
I swallow hard.
Slowly, I peel myself off the wall and turn fully toward the bars. The faint torchlight from the corridor finds Kaelen’s silhouette opposite me. He hasn’t moved much since they threw us here—still seated on the floor.
His eyes glint faintly behind the curtain of his hair. Watching.
“Did you—” My voice cracks. I clear my throat and try again. “Did you just speak… in my head?”
Silence stretches between us, thick and heavy. I start to think I really am losing my mind. Then, faint and rough as gravel dragged over stone:
“Yes.”
“What am I,” I ask, “aside from cursed and inconvenient?”
He doesn't answer.
I sink down to the floor, my back mirroring his without meaning to. The stone is cold through the thin fabric of my dress. I draw my knees up, wrapping my arms around them, staring through the bars at the space between us.
“Tell me,” I say. “The truth. It can’t be worse than what I’m already imagining.”
He doesn’t respond immediately. I hear his breathing, steady and unhurried, like someone trained to keep calm even while everything burns.
Zarek doesn’t like wasted resources, he starts. That means you are valuable to him. Dangerous or useful. Maybe both.
“Useful how?” I whisper.
Your blood. The answer comes fast, with no cushioning. Zehrael-marked. Moon-touched. Rare. People have killed over less.
My fingers dig into the fabric at my knees. “No one even knew,” I say. “I didn’t know. My mother never—”
“She knew,” he cuts in quietly. “Or suspected. You don’t hide something like that by accident.”
Images flicker in my mind—Lysara’s nervous hands smoothing my hair, her insistence on certain herbs, her quiet flinches at certain questions. The way she always brushed aside my strange instincts as “just being sensitive.”
“And now she’s dead because of it,” I say, the words coming out too brittle. “Because of me.”
The air between us shifts, a subtle tightening.
He lets that sit for a moment, then adds, more clinical now, Zarek has already calculated your value. If he can put you under his control, he can use you. Breed you.
The word breed makes my stomach knot.
I wrap my arms tighter around myself, as if I can shield my body from it.
“How do you know that’s what he’ll do?” I ask, even though something deep down already knows the answer. Zarek’s eyes, the way he looked at me like a chess piece—none of it suggested mercy.
Kaelen shifts, the chains brushing rock. Because Kharad sees people as assets or enemies. You become either a sword in his hand… or a corpse. There is no third option he respects.
“You sound like you know him well.”
For the first time, his gaze flicks away, toward the far corner of his cell. Well enough, he says.
It’s not much of an answer, but there’s something in the way he closes the topic that tells me pushing there will get me nothing—for now.
His bluntness should make me hate him.
Instead, there’s a tiny sliver of relief in having someone lay it out without ceremony. No pretty lies. No pretending. Just the map of my nightmare, drawn clean.
I tip my head back against the wall. The stone leeches heat from my skull.
“Why are you telling me?” I ask after a moment. “If you belong to him. If you’re just another weapon in his fortress, why warn me at all?”
I don’t belong to him. The answer is so sharp I flinch. There’s a steel in it that I haven't heard before.
I am his prisoner, he continues. His weapon when he needs one. His beast when it suits him. But not his.
The distinction burns with quiet defiance.
Silence again. I can’t tell if I’ve pleased him or offended him.
“So what do I do, Kaelen?” I ask. “If everything you’ve said is true, if he wants me as breeding stock and you as muscle, what’s your grand advice from the other side of the bars?”
First? he says. Don’t be stupid.
“Well, that’s comforting.”
Because, he says, voice dropping lower in my mind, wolves have cycles. So do Zehrael. And so do males like me.
There’s something in the way he says males like me that makes my breath hitch.
“Cycles,” I repeat.
Rut.
The word hangs there between us, thick and heavy and primal. I’ve heard it, whispered among warriors, joked about in dirty corners of the training yard. A time when wolves lose themselves to raw instinct. When control frays.
“You’re warning me about your rut?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.
Yes.
“And why,” I say, “would your… cycle matter to me? We’re in separate cells.”
For now.
The two words chill me more than the stone.
Zarek didn’t put you near me by accident, Kaelen continues. He knows what I am. What happens when the heat takes hold. He’s already imagining the ways he can point me at you and see what comes of it.
I picture Zarek’s detached eyes. The casual way he’d spoken of “breeding.”
My stomach turns.
“But you can control it,” I say, too quickly, as if saying it makes it true. “You were in the arena today, and you didn’t—”
That was nothing, he cuts in, his mental voice suddenly rougher, more strained. Fighting is easy. This is different. Rut… strips things away. Makes teeth out of thoughts. I can hold it for a while. Chain it. But not if he decides to push. Not if he throws you in with me and calls it a test.
The image slams into me—bars opening, that controlled power in the arena turned loose in a cramped cell with me.
Heat crawls over my skin, not from desire but from a kind of horrified awareness.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
The admission stuns me more than any threat would have. My heart beats too fast. Too loud.
It terrifies me. It also, in some twisted way, steadies me.
“What do you want me to do then?” I ask quietly. “If—if that time comes. If Zarek uses your rut… and me.”
His reply is immediate.
Don’t run.
The words hit me sideways. Stay close, he says. Stay where I can smell you, hear you, anchor to something that isn’t blood and instinct. Talk, if you can. Fight if you must. But don’t run. If you run, it’s over.
The idea of being that close to him when he’s lost in frenzy makes my skin prickle in ways I don’t want to examine.
I hug my knees tighter, cold appearing in my fingers despite the dungeon’s stale warmth.
“I don’t know if I can do what you’re asking,” I confess. “Stay. Not run.”
You can. There’s no doubt in his mental tone.
He tilts his head, studying me.
I exhale slowly, pressing my forehead to my knees, eyes stinging. I curl on the hard floor, wrapping my arms around myself.
Somewhere in the fortress above, Zarek Kharad is already planning what to do with his Zehrael prize.
Down here, in the dark, I listen to the slow, steady breathing from the cell opposite mine and realize that as much as he frightens me…
Kaelen might be the only thing standing between me and the worst of what’s coming.