38. Max
MAX
M y tent was barely large enough for a bedroll and my boots.
It nestled beside the larger tent the heirs shared, and a ring of Spartan tents surrounded ours in a protective formation.
The other high-ranking officers stayed at the outpost compound.
Some Spartans slept by the dying campfire, weapons across their laps.
Two warriors rotated watch at the perimeter.
They’d given me a tent alone. The female Spartans shared.
No one questioned the arrangement, and I didn’t protest. Privacy had been a luxury I’d never known—not in the mine, not in the men’s barracks, not even on the women’s floor.
Tonight, for the first time I could remember, four walls of canvas stood between me and the world.
I lay on the bedroll and closed my eyes.
The kiss replayed. Aelindor’s face between my hands. The cool-then-warm press of his lips. I could still feel the shape of his mouth against mine .
Then Caspian’s lips on my knuckles—the spark that had raced straight to my core.
Then Nikolai. His face between my thighs. The sounds I’d made that didn’t belong to anyone I recognized.
The memories collided, layered over each other. Sensation and guilt and want tangled into a knot I couldn’t untie.
I hadn’t meant to string them along. But the outcome looked the same—a woman playing three princes like a hand of cards. Maybe I’d worn the boy’s mask so long that the moral compass underneath had warped. Maybe this was who I’d always been, and the mine had kept me too starved to notice.
Every part of me wanted all of them. That was the truth I couldn’t outrun. It wasn’t just desire but something deeper. Something in my blood that answered each of them differently but equally, as if I’d been built to fit all four.
It felt like cheating on all of them—a crime of the heart behind every door. Yet I couldn’t quit any of them. Every one of them made me feel alive in ways I’d never been, setting every dormant cell on fire. Even Drakken’s rage lit something in me.
The day would come when I’d have to choose. If any of them still wanted me by then.
A tightness squeezed my heart. How could I choose? Choosing one meant losing the others, and the thought of that loss was like tearing off a piece of myself.
The weight of it kept me awake—bone-tired, muscles aching, heart bruised. My hands still smelled of Coldiron.
Finally, I sank into the borderland between waking and sleep. The place where the body surrenders but the mind hasn’t followed. Where the walls you’ve built go thin.
The DarkVeil called to me.
Voices. Many voices, layered like echoes in a canyon, speaking ancient words I almost understood. The massive darkness pulsed against the edge of my consciousness, pressing inward.
Crimson lightning flashed within the Veil, illuminating chasms that crawled with hellfire.
I could no longer tell if this was real, dream, or vision.
Another flash. In its glare, something floated toward me through the dark—carried on shadow, resting on nothing.
A head.
A woman’s severed head, preserved in a case of warded steel and glass. The face was pale, drained, lips colorless. But the eyes were open. Alive. Aware. Conscious of every second of an existence that should have ended when the blade fell.
I knew what she was before the knowledge formed into words.
The Oracle. The one the Collector had beheaded and kept alive with dark magic so he could own her visions forever.
This close to the DarkVeil, she could reach across time and space.
A link I hadn’t known existed lit up between us like a wire catching current.
Her bloodless lips parted .
Max. He has your sister.
“Lies.” My voice came out raw, distant, as if shouted across a chasm. “My sister is in the mine.”
He found out about you. The Oracle’s mouth barely moved, but the words arrived like stones. He’s been searching for you for a very long time. Now he knows everything. He has your sister in the Haven.
Her milky eyes turned black. The absolute black of the DarkVeil itself, as if the void had poured into her sockets.
And in that blackness, I saw Missy.
My sister stood small and trembling, her image reflected in the Oracle’s ink-black eyes like a tiny flame guttering in a vast darkness.
She wore the same threadbare shift she’d been wearing when I’d last held her.
Her face was thinner. Her eyes were enormous, wide with a terror that no little girl should ever know.
Then, as if a connection ignited between us—a bridge built of blood and desperation—Missy saw me.
“Max!” she screamed. “Max!”
Her voice shattered me. I reached for her, arms outstretched, fingers clawing at the dark.
“Missy! Missy!”
The blackness of the Oracle’s eyes expanded, spreading outward like a tide. It swallowed the image of my sister inch by inch—her outstretched hands, her face, her scream—until nothing was left but the void. The same void that hung three blocks from my tent, stretching from the ground to the sky.
“No! No! Missy! My little viper! ”
“Wake up, Max!”
Hands seized my shoulders. Shook me hard.
My eyes snapped open. The tent. The canvas walls. The faint glow of the campfire outside. Tears streaming down my face, soaking the bedroll beneath my head.
Aelindor knelt beside me. His silver hair fell loose around his shoulders, his eyes bright with alarm in the dim light. He’d come without his uniform coat—just a linen shirt, hastily pulled on, as if he’d felt my distress from the next tent and hadn’t stopped to dress.
He gathered me into his lap. I let him. I had nothing left. I clung to him the way a drowning person clings to the only solid thing in the water. My face pressed into the curve of his neck, my fingers knotted in his shirt, my body shaking with ugly sobs I couldn’t control.
“I’m here,” he murmured against my hair. His arms tightened around me. “It was a nightmare, love. It’s passed. You’re safe. Nothing will get to you. Not while I breathe.”
Then he kissed me. His scent of pine and powerful male blanketed me like a shield. My body heated, hummed, reached for him. He deepened the kiss, as if he could seal every crack the nightmare had torn open and fend off any danger coming toward me.
I tasted salt. My tears. My grief. My fear. And beneath all of it, him.
But cold panic closed around my throat, sealing my lungs. The Oracle’s words haunted me, lodged in my chest like shrapnel.
I broke the kiss.
“It wasn’t a nightmare.” I gripped his shirt tighter and pressed my forehead against his jaw. “It was a message.”
A raw, wrecked sob ripped out of me.
“The Collector has my little sister.”
Blood and Bond 2: Foolsilver
Coming in July/August 2026