Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
AZRAEL
I lead her through the palace toward the training arena, and she is already memorizing the route.
I can see it in the way her eyes track doorways, count turns, and note architectural features. Professional habit. The thief in her cannot help mapping escape routes, even when escape is impossible.
It is almost endearing.
Almost.
She is wearing the same torn tactical gear from the heist. Black fabric clings to lean muscle; her braid half undone and falling over one shoulder. Dust marks her cheekbone. A scrape runs along her forearm where she hit the museum floor.
She looks as if she has been through hell.
She looks?—
I shove the thought down before it can form. Some thoughts become dangerous the moment they are given shape.
The shadows under my skin stir in response. I force them still.
She is human. A tool. A means to repair what she destroyed.
Nothing more.
“Where are we going?” Her voice echoes off the black glass.
“The training arena.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“You will see when we arrive.”
She makes a frustrated sound behind me. I can feel her glare on my back.
“You know, for someone who needs my help, you’re being remarkably unhelpful.”
“You were the one who insisted you would run at the first opportunity.” I do not turn around. “Forgive me for not providing detailed maps and strategic intelligence to a self-proclaimed escape artist.”
“Self-proclaimed? I’m the best?—”
“The best thief in three continents, yes.” I stop walking.
She nearly runs into me.
I glance back. Her eyes narrow immediately. In the purple-tinged light of the corridor, they look less green and more grey. Storm-colored.
“Then you know I don’t fail,” she says.
“Everyone fails eventually.” I resume walking. “You are about to learn that lesson intimately.”
She does not respond, but her breathing shifts. Quicker now. Anticipation or anger. Hard to tell. Possibly both.
The arena doors loom ahead. Thirty feet of shadowstone carved with ancient battles. They open at my approach, responding to my magic.
Morgana stops in the doorway.
The arena is vast. Circular. The floor is polished black stone, reflecting the dim lights overhead like trapped stars. Tiered seating rises in rings around us, empty now, built to hold thousands. This is where my warriors train. Where challenges are issued. Where blood is earned.
At the center, thirteen black candles sit in a perfect circle. Their flames burn purple. Steady. Unnatural. They cast no heat, no smoke, and no shadows. A warning, if she knew how to read it.
“What is this?” Morgana asks, her voice carefully neutral.
“Your test.”
I descend the steps to the arena floor. She follows after a moment of hesitation.
“The rules are simple. You have one hour to extinguish all thirteen candles using only shadow magic.”
She stares at the candles, then at me.
“I told you. I don’t have shadow magic.”
“You do. Dormant. Untrained. Weak.” I lean against the arena wall near the entrance. “But present. You only need to access it.”
“And how exactly?—”
“Figure it out.”
Her jaw tightens.
“You are resourceful. Clever. You have spent years breaking into impossible places and stealing impossible things. Surely extinguishing a few candles is not beyond you.”
Her eyes sharpen. “You’re serious.”
“Completely.”
“And if I succeed?”
“I will send you back to Earth. Your memories of Aethermoor, of magic, of me will be wiped clean. You will return to your life as if none of this ever happened.”
I watch it land inside her. I watch hope flicker before she can hide it.
“You will be free.”
“And if I fail?”
“Five years.”
The words settle between us. Heavy. Absolute.
“Five years as mine, Morgana Bellamy. Entirely. Long enough for the binding to hold. Short enough for your human life force to survive it.”
She swallows. I watch her throat move.
“That’s insane.”
“That is the wager.” I gesture toward the candles. “Make your choice. Walk away now, and I will kill you quickly. Or you can try and possibly win your freedom.”
She looks at the candles again. Then back at me. I can see her mind working. Calculating. Measuring.
She is a gambler at heart. I knew she would be.
“What if one goes out by accident?”
“It will not.”
“If I break them?”
“You cannot.”
“If I refuse to play?”
“Then you have chosen option one.”
An intriguing mix of resignation and determination spreads across her face as she lifts her eyes toward mine.
“One hour,” she says finally.
“One hour.” I pull a timepiece from my pocket. Ornate. Dark silver. Ticking with precise mechanical rhythm. “Starting now.”
In the silence of the arena, each tick sounds less like time passing and more like a sentence being carried out.
She moves toward the nearest candle.
I settle against the wall to watch.
She tries blowing on them first.
Practical. Logical. Completely useless.
The purple flames do not flicker. They do not react to air or breath, or force. They are not meant to.
But she does not know that yet.
After three candles, she changes her approach. She waves her hands over them, trying to smother the flames with movement.
Still nothing.
Ten minutes pass.
She circles the candles now, studying them from different angles as if there is a pattern she is missing. Her brow is furrowed in concentration. Every line of her face sharpened by focus.
She is magnificent when she is thinking. All that chaos in her turned into precision.
I should not notice.
I do not need to notice.
The shadows coil tighter around my wrists.
Twenty minutes.
She drops to her knees beside one candle, hands hovering over the flame. Her eyes close. Concentration etched into every breath.
She is trying to feel the magic.
To sense it.
Not a terrible strategy, actually. If she had any training, any awareness of how her power works, it might yield results.
But she does not.
Will not.
I rigged this from the start. If she wins, two worlds burn. I will not pretend honor matters more than survival.
Thirty minutes.
Her hands are shaking now. Sweat beads at her temples despite the arena’s cool air. She has moved on to verbal commands, demanding the candles extinguish, ordering them, then begging them outright.
Her voice is growing hoarse.
For half a breath, the shadow beneath her left hand twitches toward the nearest flame. Then panic fractures her focus, and it goes still.
I check the timepiece. Halfway done.
She stands abruptly and begins pacing the circle, dragging her hands through her hair in frustration. The braid has come undone completely now, dark strands spilling past her shoulders in uneven waves.
She looks wild. Desperate.
Beautiful.
Damn it.
Forty minutes.
She tries visualization now. Eyes closed, hands extended, face tightened in concentration so intense it borders on pain.
“Come on,” she mutters. “Come on, you bastard candles. Just, just go out.”
Nothing happens.
Her shoulders drop.
Fifty minutes.
Panic is settling in properly now. I can see it in the way her movements have turned jerky, uncoordinated. She has tried everything her human mind can conceive, every logical approach, every desperate variation of will.
All of it useless.
She does not have the first idea how to access magic she does not even know exists in any practical sense.
I designed it that way.
“Ten minutes,” I call out.
She flinches and spins toward me. Her eyes are bright. Too bright.
“Shut up,” she snaps.
I say nothing. I just watch.
She closes her eyes again and draws a breath. I can see her trying to center herself, to push past panic and force clarity into chaos.
Good instincts.
Still useless.
Five minutes.
She stands in the center of the circle now, perfectly still, just breathing. Feeling. Searching for something inside herself that she cannot reach without training, without years of control, without anyone ever having shown her how.
“Two minutes.”
Her eyes snap open.
The desperation there is raw enough to taste.
She makes one final attempt. Her hands shoot outward toward all thirteen candles at once. Her face tightens and contorts with effort. A sound tears out of her throat, half scream, half broken plea.
The flames do not even tremble.
“Time.”
The word drops into the arena like a stone into still water.
Morgana freezes.
Then, slowly, painfully slowly, she turns to look at me.
All thirteen candles still burning behind her.
“No.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “No, that’s not....I need more time.”
“The hour is complete.” I push off the wall and walk toward her with measured steps. “You failed.”
“Because you didn’t teach me!” The words explode out of her. The sound echoes hard against stone. She is shaking now, fury and exhaustion and something like betrayal twisting her face. “You gave me nothing. No instruction. No guidance. How was I supposed to do anything with nothing?”
Every word is true. None of it changes what must happen next.
“I told you the game was magic.” I stop a few feet from her. Close enough to see the tears she is refusing to let fall. “I never said it was fair.”
Understanding breaks across her expression like a crack in glass.
“You cheating bastard.”
“Mmm.” I tilt my head slightly. “Accurate. Still irrelevant.”
“You knew I couldn’t do it.” She steps toward me, rage radiating off her in visible waves. “You knew from the start this was impossible.”
“I gave you a chance.” My voice stays even. Controlled. “A better chance than you gave those people in Prague when you shattered the seal.”
That stops her.
The reminder lands heavier than anything else.
Her hands curl into fists at her sides.
“Five years, Morgana Bellamy.” I step closer again. She does not move back. Stubborn even now. Even in defeat. “Your life belongs to me.”
“Like hell.”
“You accepted the wager. You lost.” I reach out, catch her chin, and tilt her face up toward mine.
Her skin is warm beneath my fingers. Her pulse is frantic where it beats against my thumb.
“Did you think I would let you walk away? That I would trust the woman who destroyed everything to simply decide to help me?”
She jerks her head away from my hand. “I would have helped.”
“No.” I let go. “You would have run the moment we reached Earth. You would have disappeared into your comfortable life and left both worlds to burn.”
“I had a choice.”
“You had one then.” My gaze sharpens. “Not anymore.”
The shadows move.
They rise from the edges of the arena, from the walls, from beneath the stone itself. They pour toward us like something alive, remembering it has a body.
They wrap around her wrists first. Then her ankles. Then her waist.
She gasps and pulls instinctively, but the bindings do not break. They tighten only enough to hold her in place, not enough to hurt. Just enough to remind her that they are there.
Her breath stutters.
Her eyes widen as the shadows slide over her skin.
Fear, yes.
But something else flickers beneath it. Something that makes her inhale too sharply, makes her body go still in a way that has nothing to do with resistance.
Interesting.
“The binding will manifest now,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than intended. “You will feel it when it takes hold.”
“What binding?” She is still testing the shadows, still trying to pull free. Useless. “What are you doing to me?”
“The magical contract.” I step closer. The shadows part for me without hesitation.
Always responsive to my will. “For five years, your life force is tied to mine. You cannot run. Distance will cause you pain. You cannot harm me without harming yourself,” I say, leaning in just slightly.
“And for the next five years, you will obey me.”
Horror floods her expression. “That’s slavery.”
There are prettier words for it in old contracts and court law. None of them make her wrong.
“That’s the wager you accepted.” Something twists in my chest, unfamiliar and uncomfortable. “You gambled. You lost.”
I do not say what I am thinking. That I need this. That I need her bound to me so her human life force can slow the corruption eating through my magic. That I need her close enough to anchor myself when the void threatens to consume me.
She does not need to know that.
Not yet.
The shadows pulse once, then again.
Then they sink into her skin.
She screams.
The sound is raw, breaking in a way that scrapes through the air itself. The binding magic forces its way through her system, rewriting her magical signature, stitching her life force to mine with brutal precision.
And then I feel it.
The moment the connection locks into place, her presence floods through me. Sudden, overwhelming, intimate in ways I did not anticipate.
I meant to create a chain. I did not expect it to have two ends.
Her fury burns bright and fierce. Her fear is cold and sharp. Her pulse races like a trapped bird. Her breath comes quick and shallow. Her pain coils through everything, the binding burning through her veins like liquid fire.
All of it is inside me now.
I did not expect it to be this strong. This immediate.
For one impossible second, the corruption inside me falls silent, as if her life force has pressed a blade to its throat.
That should satisfy me.
Instead, every instinct I possess goes still with warning.
She is gasping on her knees when the shadows finally release her, though she is shaking too violently to stand. I force myself not to move toward her.
Not to reach for her.
I have taken enough from her tonight. I will not insult her by pretending my hands are gentle.
When she finally looks up, her wrists are marked.
Black tattoos wind around them like living shadow, intricate patterns pulsing with dark light. Beautiful and terrible. The physical proof of what she has become to me.
I lift my own hands.
Matching marks circle my wrists.
Her gaze snaps between them and me. “What did you do to me?”
“Bound you.” I crouch in front of her, bringing myself to her level. Her eyes are still storm-grey-green, still burning with defiance despite everything. “The marks are permanent. A reminder that you belong to me now.”
“I don’t belong to anyone.”
“For five years, you do.”
I take her wrist.
The mark flares beneath my touch, and she gasps, the sound sharp as the connection jolts between us. Electric. Immediate. I feel it all again, the shock of her awareness slamming into mine.
“I can sense you now,” I whisper. “Your location. Your emotional state. Whether you are in danger.”
I turn her wrist slightly, studying the shadowed pattern as it shifts under my fingers. “And you can sense me. Whether you want to or not.”
She yanks her arm back as if my touch burns.
“I will make you regret this.”
It should be empty bravado. A desperate threat from someone who has already lost.
But she is watching me as if she means it. Like she is already calculating how.
She will fight me every step of the way. Resist with every breath. Turn this bond into something sharp enough to cut.
I should be irritated.
I am not.
Something almost like interest settles instead, dark and unwelcome.
My mouth curves before I can stop it.
“I am counting on it.”